By: Kathryn Pentiuk | Southfield Sun | Published November 25, 2024
SOUTHFIELD — In January 2024, the city of Southfield partnered with Make Food Not Waste, a Detroit-based nonprofit, to launch a yearlong food waste elimination study funded by a grant.
“The estimate is that Southfield produces 35 million pounds of food waste every year, and that comes from all sources. So that’s mostly residential, but it’s also businesses, schools, institutions, the whole, it’s everybody. So it ends up to be roughly a pound a person per day,” said Danielle Todd, the executive director of Make Food Not Waste.
This data comes from a calculator from the Natural Resources Defense Council that MFNW uses to do estimates for all the cities they partner with.
Though Southfield was the first municipality to launch a food waste elimination study, Todd added that the organization is now working on studies with Canton, Dearborn, Farmington Hills and Livonia.
“Some of them already have a lot of things in place,” she said.
“For example, Canton already has a really robust drop-off program for its food scraps. So what we’re going to be doing in these cities is taking a look at what we’ve learned from going through the Southfield planning and seeing what we can bring to these other cities and then how, based on their structure, their makeup and their existing resources, what it would take for them to do the same thing – to reroute all that food away from landfills.”
Todd explained that the goal is to have food waste elimination programs up and running in the bigger southeast Michigan cities by 2030 at a low cost to residents.
“The hope is that we will be securing funding to implement the plan, so the majority of the costs are not going to be borne by the residents of Southfield. This is all likely grants and philanthropy that we would connect with in order to implement the plan. We did that by design.”
During the first phase of the study, a team by Make Food Not Waste worked to determine the resources needed to eliminate food waste in Southfield. As the study wraps up, Souzan Hanna, Southfield’s sustainability planner, explained that a plan will be developed for Southfield and presented before the City Council in January 2025.
“It’s a tough conversation to have with people when you use the word ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming,’ but I’m also in the mindset of flipping that and saying, ‘Hey, how about from a humanitarian perspective?’” Hanna explained.
“We’re saving food to help those in need, and we’ve done a little bit of a profile on Southfield, identifying that 15,000 tons of food in Southfield is wasted and 9% of the population is food insecure. So how about reallocating that to make sure we take care of the food-insecure population?”
Hanna explained that implementing a food waste elimination plan in Southfield would be a step-by-step process that would engage the residents.
“We identified a lot of strategies in the plan. I think the most basic implementation that we can start with is having a public education or a communication campaign, which would inform residents, restaurant owners, and the commercial sector what the City is trying to accomplish,” Hanna said.
“We want to be aggressive, but also catch the attention of people to be able to participate in some food waste elimination programs. We want people to understand techniques to preserve their food.”
She added that the team has had three sessions where they surveyed Southfield residents and asked them about composting and what would prevent them from participating in a food waste program. Hanna said that most residents are focused on a convenient approach and are open to putting their food waste in the yard waste.
Todd added, “What we’re recommending is that for anyone who chooses to compost their fruits and vegetable scraps in their backyard, awesome, but that we also offer a way for people to be able to put out their food scraps the same way they put out their trash and their yard waste every week, and have it picked up and taken to a commercial site where it’s composted; probably the food scraps would go to the same place where the yard waste goes, because the yard waste is organic, just like the food scraps, and they can mush that together and make great compost with it. So that’s going to be our recommendation on the residential side.”
For commercial buildings, it would be up to the property manager to set up the collection, just like trash or recycling. However, Todd added that they would likely provide recommended drop-off sites for commercial residents.
For those who want to try their hand at composting in their backyard, Todd emphasized the importance of composting safely to prevent rodents and odors.
“The important thing about composting in your backyard is that you’re not able to put any kind of animal products in there, so you’re not (composting) chicken bones or meat or anything like that. It’s strictly fruit and vegetable scraps. So because of that, because you can’t compost everything in your backyard easily.”
Todd shared that another way residents can get involved in helping to reduce food waste is to utilize an app called Too Good To Go, which started as a platform for big cities but is now moving into suburbs like Southfield.
The app allows restaurants to put anything that they have left at the end of service at a discount, and then users can go online to buy discounted items and pick up their order from the restaurant.
Hanna also shared that Southfield was given three awards/recognitions for its sustainability efforts this year. Southfield was designated a gold community by the Michigan Green Communities program for exemplary action in multiple categories such as planning, economic development, land use, energy efficiency, materials management, water conservation and protection, clean mobility, and community engagement.
Southfield was also given an Honorable Mention at the United States Conference of Mayors in the Mayors’ Climate Protection Awards and was featured as one of 13 communities in the 18th anniversary publication.
The city of Southfield was also awarded a bronze designation from the Charging Smart Program, making Southfield the first city in the state of Michigan to earn this title.
Hanna is eager to get started on implementing the food elimination plan.
“I think it’s going to take a little while to get there, but I think the adoption of the plan will really hold us accountable to make those changes. And hopefully, five years from now, we can look back and say, ‘Wow, we came from nothing to having some numbers to identify who’s participating, how many pounds of food we were able to save.’”
For more information on Southfield’s sustainability projects and initiatives, visit cityofsouthfield.com/news/city-southfield-seeks-public-input-sustainable-southfield-survey.