Over the last 10 years, storms like Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Irene have inspired the City of New Orleans to pursue a resilience strategy that modernizes its utility systems and public infrastructure. With it, 100 cities around the world have also committed to becoming more resilient to the weather events we should now expect in the late months of summer.
Utility systems and critical business services need to become physically stronger — often independent of electrical grid power in case of an outage — and able to withstand the stormwater that can overwhelm operations in a matter of hours. What you don’t hear as much about, however, is the impact these disasters can have on a community’s food supply.
This year, the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) released a report suggesting a city’s food system has a great deal to do with its ability to care for its citizens after a natural disaster or economic event that throws them off balance. Instinct tells us to donate food — and we should — but utility systems can turn non-donated food into energy, which keeps public infrastructure running while further shrinking the organic waste stream during times of crisis.
A Giving Strategy
One of the ICIC’s research areas was New York City, an example of multiple systems designed to resist and rebound from these disruptions. A Manhattan-based college hosts a new cogeneration-based microgrid that kept most of the campus up and running during Hurricane Sandy.
After this event, NYC was able to engage food-donation programs that, as of recently, account for half of all food distributed citywide. In 2015, New York food rescuers at City Harvest diverted more than 50 million pounds of food from the city’s waste stream and into numerous hunger-relief outlets across New York.
Food for Power
Not all food waste can be donated, though, which means there’s a ceiling on how much homes and businesses can really recover from a life-threatening situation using their food banks. While some food retailers may not know how or to whom to donate their excess, according to the report, some pantries have restrictions against commercially produced goods that don’t meet their nutrition guidelines.
Feeding waste food to public utilities that can process it has a threefold benefit to a vulnerable community: It reduces the organic content of its landfills, powers its public infrastructure and makes it even easier for communities to stabilize themselves. So, cities all over North America are now reusing this non-donated surplus. By partnering with food manufacturers and retailers, they can have their fats, oils and grease (FOG) — as well as other pre-consumer, source-separated organics (SSO) — processed as biofuel for utility sites that need to stay operational during an emergency.
Supporting Wastewater and Unburdening Businesses
Wastewater treatment plants across the continent use biodigester units to break down food and extract its energy content in the form of methane for conversion into electricity and heat. These biofuels allow utility systems to resume essential treatment services and keep delivering clean water to families and businesses when their access — physically or financially — becomes limited.
Gresham, Oregon’s wastewater plant recently worked with Veolia on this bio-energy conversion process to become “net zero” — completely self-sustainable and independent of the city’s electric grid.
Also known as organics to energy (O2E), this practice is filled with benefits for the hospitality industry as well: less to transport (which means lower transit costs), less energy used to preserve food and a faster supply chain. Ultimately, diverting food waste in this way is the circular economy at work in the worst of times. It repurposes some excess to ensure a city’s essential services can keep providing for those who need it — all without overwhelming the public waste stream or overextending themselves to store food products they have nowhere else to put.
New York has since expanded its organics collection program to include the conversion of waste food into biogas, embracing a resilience strategy that challenges the city to reach zero waste by 2030.
Food systems are just as much a part of a government’s defense against volatile climates as the utility systems they’re capable of supporting. By acting on this connection, even the most disaster-sensitive neighborhoods can bounce back from an event that threatens their everyday life.
Read Part 3 of this series here.
