The world’s thirstiest crop is also responsible for feeding half our planet. The Sustainable Rice Platform thinks it can make a better life for farmers and consumers alike.

UBON RATCHATHANI, Thailand

The full moon casts a milky glow over the watery green fields in Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand’s largest rice-producing province. The light brings up a childhood memory for rice farmer Banjong Panin. On full moon nights, her parents would bring Banjong and her siblings to spend the night near their paddy fields.

“That was like a night of camping for us kids,” she says with a smile. “I couldn’t wait to see it.”

It was only much later that she discovered those nights were not camping adventures – her family was guarding their paddy against someone who could slip into the field, guided by the moonlight, and steal their rice.

Now in her mid-fifties and a grandmother herself, Banjong continues to eke out a living by laboring in the fields. Out of her 2.4 hectares, her family makes just

$1,500 yearly—a paltry sum compared to Thailand’s average household income of $10,346. She and her two sons work odd jobs to make ends meet.

Banjong’s hardships closely resemble that of 144 million small rice farmers worldwide. They are responsible for producing 729 million tons of rice that feed nearly half the world’s population, and their job isn’t getting less important. According to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), rice production must increase by 25% by 2050, reaching 1 billion tons, to match growing demand.

It can feel like a Sisyphean task, not least because climate change has led to a severe lack of water, the first and most essential resource for rice cultivation.

Rice is one of the world’s thirstiest crops, requiring up to 2,500 liters of water per kilogram – twice the amount needed for wheat and five times that for maize. One-third of the world’s developed freshwater resource goes to irrigated rice. And rice farmers like Banjong are on the front line. “There has been less and less rain, and we were forced to farm with barely enough water,” she explains. “The yield decreased, and rice barely survived the driest years.”

Then a neighbor introduced her—and other farmers in her village—to the Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP). The cutting-edge playbook for creating more sustainable, drought-resistant and higher-quality rice crops also promised to take much less labor. But this wasn’t a new technology per se, just a system of best practices and accountability. Could it really do all that?

The world’s first rice standard

The SRP secretariat is located in Bangkok, Thailand’s bustling capital. Co- found in 2011 by the IRRI and the United Nations Environment Programme, and with over 100 research and private sector partners, the SRP is the world’s first rice standard. For a food that is so widely consumed, it’s a bit odd that it took so long to standardize its production in a sustainable way.

Wyn Ellis, Executive Director of SRP, points out there have been longstanding efforts to make perceived high-value crops like coffee or cotton more sustainable. “Rice, on the other hand, is considered substantially less sophisticated, and so it’s overlooked despite a larger carbon footprint,” he says. The danger of that oversight can go in two directions, he says. Rice can harm the planet while itself “becoming a victim” of global warming.

One hectare of rice crop, if farmed with constant flooding and chemical fertilizers, can emit up to 300 kg of the potent greenhouse gas methane. SRP aims to reform the global rice sector to help improve the planet, the product, and the people who farm it.

But to do this, the rice value chain had to be redesigned from beginning to end.

The details that matter

The SRP standard covers eight areas split into 41 separate indications to assist farmers in sustainably growing and harvesting rice. Farmers are advised on everything from farm management and pre-planting to water use, nutrient management, and integrated pest management. Best practices, such as including drying time in post-harvest (which has been shown to ensure the highest quality grain), are encouraged.

Thanu Thanhakij, who oversees nearly 150 rice farmers in his role at the Ban Don Mu Community Rice Center in Ubon Ratchathani, adopted the SRP standard in 2018 to astonishing results. “Only direct seeding, rather than sowing over the field as in the past, saved us 80% of what we paid for seed,” he explains. “We saved 60% off the overall cost. Rather than flooding the field for an entire month, alternate watering and drying saved us 50% of the water and yielded more rich grain. Land studies enable us to have custom-made fertilizers and determine how much we need. There’sno reason to waste money on fertilizer we don’tunderstand. We now have cash left in our pockets.”

The standard also addresses health and safety criteria for farmers, including personal protective equipment, pesticide and chemical storage, and disposal. While it may seem initially daunting, farmers choose which of the 41 indicators they can realistically meet, and SRP assigns a compliance score based on their selection.

Farmers, for example, will score two points if they do not use pesticides. If the farmer used pesticides but followed the SRP guidelines while doing so, they would receive one point. The use of pesticides without training results in a zero.

Based on self and group evaluations, farmers evaluate themselves. Farmers earning 33 out of 100 points are “working toward sustainable rice cultivation;” those who receive 90 points have “sustainably cultivated rice.”

Crunching the numbers

SRP has 506 SRP-verified trainers working with over 150,000 farmers in 39 countries. In 2022 alone, SRP verified just under 130,000 tons of paddy rice from more than 30,000 hectares in India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Spain. This year, Ellis and his colleagues intend to double all those numbers. But their work doesn’t end with a fancy product label. “We’re not here to flash another certificate,” Ellis explains. “We’re here to make sustainable change.”

Only rice that meets the highest level of “the SRP Assurance Scheme” can leave the nation of origin as SRP-verified rice. Developed in 2020, the SRP Assurance Scheme comprises three degrees of assurance based on different evaluation demands and levels of robustness. Rice farmers and farmer organizations can select between self-assessment at Level 1 and second-party verification at Level 2.

Those who passed Level 3 audits conducted by independent third-party auditors are allowed to use the SRP label on their products. SRP-Verified rice is now accessible on retail shelves in 20 countries, including Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. SRP’s marketing team in Europe works closely with food retailers and organizations, including Lidl, Costco, and Walmart, to put SRP rice on shelves.

Success and Challenges

Shahid Tarer, Managing Director and CEO of Galaxy Rice, one of Pakistan’s biggest basmati rice exporters, has shipped 15,000 tons of his SRP-verified rice to the European market in the last four years. He first learned about SRP in 2015 and was immediately enamored. Dealing with farmers, though, was a longer process.

“That was difficult in the beginning,” he recalls. “We informed farmers about this novel approach and gathered them to work together. It was tough. I remember the third year when we weren’t sure if we could pull it off.” Despite early reservations about changing their habits, more than 600 farmers he works with use SRP.

The Loc Troi Group, Vietnam’s rice trading leader, first piloted the SRP standard with 150 farmers on 450 hectares in 2016. They’ve since expanded to 3500 farmers throughout the Mekong Delta on 11,000 hectares. Loc Troi Group has supported hundreds of farmers to reach the perfect score of 100 points on the SRP scale.

“However, consumers knew little about sustainable rice,” explains Tran Nguyen Ha Trang, Deputy Director of the Loc Troi Agricultural Research Institute Loc Troi Group. “SRP market investigation and promotion are essential so that consumers are willing to pay for healthy rice that is good for the environment and community.“

Looking forward

Next year, SRP and a host of partners will launch rice farmer finance operations in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Their mix of policy and market- oriented solutions has been successful wherever they have expanded. In 2019, the Sustainable Rice Landscapes Initiative used the SRP as its “replicable and scalable” tool to help them measure and manage 4.2 million hectares in South and Southeast Asia to reduce 116.2 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

But its impact on individuals is most strongly felt. Back in Ubon Ratchathani, Banjong notices the first farmer in her village starting to harvest in preparation for the upcoming wet season. The rest of his neighbors will soon follow. Banjong is proud of her sustainably cultivated rice. Just as importantly, the money she has saved from SRP farming goes toward her three young grandchildren’s schooling. She’s building a bright future for them and a safer, more sustainable world around them.

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How a 141-year-old waste management company is pioneering the recycling—rather than mining—of phosphorus and other nutrients we need to keep feeding the world.

UPPSALA, Sweden

he person who discovered phosphorus was hoping to find something else. In Hamburg in 1669, the self-styled chemist Hennig Brand was, like many of his peers at the time, trying to turn base metals into gold.

Believing that the human body was the key, he boiled large amounts of urine and heated the residue, eventually producing a white, waxy substance that glowed in the dark. Brand called his discovery phosphorus, from the Greek for “light-bearer.” (He later sold his supply for 200 thalers—about $13,300 in today’s money—when he needed some cash.)

For more than a century phosphorus was made through this method, for example to produce an early version of matches, until in the 18th century a couple of Swedish chemists discovered that calcium phosphate could be sourced from bones, which became an early fertilizer. This and other discoveries eventually led to the development of commercial fertilizers, by far the largest global use for phosphorus, and enabled the Green Revolution and a massive global population boom.

But the way we source phosphorus—mining it from reserves in a handful of countries and importing it—is unstable and unsustainable. Phosphorus feeds the world, but also pollutes it, and phosphorus prices and conflict are disrupting food production. There’s a race on once again to revolutionize how we get our phosphorus, and scientists are, as they were at the beginning, looking at human waste for answers.

In 2005, Yariv Cohen, then a 34-year-old chemical engineer, was working on this problem when he made his own accidental discovery. While conducting PhD research in recovering phosphorus from sewage sludge ash—a by- product of incinerating sewage sludge—at Sweden’s University of Agricultural Sciences, he set up an experiment to recover phosphorus in the form of a highly concentrated ammonium phosphate solution. “I was testing a new idea for concentrating the solution without water evaporation—by circulating the ion exchange regeneration solutions and adding ammonia in a particular way to obtain a final product with as high a concentration as possible,” he says. He then left it to run overnight.

“I came to the lab in the morning, and instead of finding a highly concentrated solution as I expected, the system was completely clogged with white crystals, like it was covered with snow,” says Cohen.

“Initially, I was disappointed that the experiment failed,” he says. But it hadn’t: the white stuff turned out to be pure ammonium phosphate crystals, and he realized he had indeed found a method to recover solid phosphorus crystals without the need for evaporation—a new, more energy-efficient way.

Cohen’s PhD research and years of investigating phosphorus recovery techniques led to his current role as head of research and development at Sweden’s EasyMining. The company now holds several global patents for the extraction and recovery of resources from wastewater, sewage, and fly ash—a byproduct of incinerated waste—for which the company, along with its parent, Ragn-Sells, is shortlisted for the 2022 Food Planet Prize. Their technologies can potentially improve food security by recovering nutrients—producing better quality than mined ones—from waste to reuse in fertilizer and other uses, instead of relying on unstable global supply chains.

“The whole value chain needs to be changed,” says Cohen. There are many ways to recover nutrients from our food and waste cycle, but it’s not being done at a large scale—yet. “Quantities matter and quality matters,” says Cohen, when it comes to making recovery viable. Both are a challenge.

Put simply, there is no life without phosphorus. Phosphates are essential for bones and teeth, for DNA, and for every living cell. As an essential ingredient in all fertilizers, it’s also crucial for crop growth. “Plants need all three—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—to grow,” says Cohen. But unlike nitrogen, phosphorus is finite: it cannot be replaced, substituted, or manufactured.

The world’s phosphorus supplies—which took millions of years to form— are depleting, with reserves of phosphate rock concentrated in a handful of countries. Morocco, China, Egypt, Algeria, and Syria control 85% of the world’s phosphate rock reserves. About 80% of mined phosphate rock—sedimentary rock containing fossilized deposits composed of remains of animals, algae, and sea creatures—is converted into mineral fertilizers for global food production.

As earth’s population grows, we will need more phosphorus to produce food at a time when it’s becoming more scarce and much more expensive. The biggest need is in developing countries, which are already affected by rising prices. One large study released this summer states that global phosphate prices have risen 400% since 2020 and 1 in 7 farmers can’t access or afford phosphorus.

The largest share of the world’s phosphorus reserves—around 70%, according to the latest US Geological Survey—is located in Morocco and the Western Sahara. China’s 5% of phosphorus reserves is a distant second, but China is the world’s largest producer, and if it keeps producing at the current rate, its reserves will be depleted in the next 35 years. There is only one operating phosphorus mine in the European Union, in Finland. This mine produces 1 million tonnes annually, about 10 percent of the EU’s need, and is projected to be depleted by 2035.

Along with having the most reserves, Morocco is the world’s largest exporter and the second largest producer of phosphates, if one includes Western Sahara, a long disputed territory where the remote Bou Craa mine is located. This mine has one of the world’s largest phosphorus deposits, at 1.7 billion tons, and currently produces 3 million tons annually. The mined rock is transported on the world’s largest conveyor belt system from the mine to the coast 61 miles away, from where it is shipped all around the world.

“Most of us, most days, will eat some food grown on fields fertilized by phosphate rock from [Bou Craa] mine,” environmental author and journalist Fred Pearce noted in Yale’s University’s Environment360 blog. Conflict and high costs have already disrupted production in Morocco. Unless we can recycle more phosphorus or access other sources, Morocco’s share of worldwide production could be 80% by 2100, a level of concentration that is inherently dangerous to global supply chains.

There is now another pressing problem with phosphorus and food security on the European continent. Russian-mined phosphate dominates the European import market, and the war in Ukraine was a looming topic at the 4th European Sustainable Phosphorus Conference (ESPC), held in Vienna in June 2022.

“Currently, the phosphorus price is so high because of a shortage we already had, and [Ukraine’s invasion by] Russia,” says Ludwig Hermann, President of the European Sustainable Phosphorus Platform, which organized the conference.

Mining is precarious, but phosphorus needs are rising. That is why phosphorus recovery, long discussed but little implemented (at least not at scale), is having its moment. Phosphorus mines may be finite, but the substance can be recovered in several different ways from sources such as human waste, plant matter, manure, and the waste of food that has been treated with phosphorus fertilizer.

In 2019, over 500 scientists signed ‘The Helsinki Declaration,’ calling for food, agriculture, waste and other sectors to improve global phosphorus sustainability.

At the ESPC in Vienna, over 300 people gathered at the Andaz Hotel conference center to discuss the latest in phosphorus sustainability—from across science and academia, industry, energy companies, fertilizer companies, researchers, journalists, politicians, EU policymakers. At the hotel’s conference center, attendees mingled around standing tables with coffee and Viennese pastries, but also among jars containing samples of fertilizer pellets, sewage sludge ash (which resembles ground coffee) and calcium phosphate (a white powder) that had been recycled, rather than mined.

Their goal: to arrive at what Christian Kabbe, CEO of EasyMining’s Germany office, calls the “reality stage.” That means not just recovering phosphorus, in large enough amounts and good enough quality—scrubbed of a lot of the toxic heavy metals such as cadmium and uranium that exist in sewage sludge ash— but also finding the market for it.

“Recovery tends to still be technology focused, and few have explored the market side,” says Kabbe. The amount of recovered phosphorus is also crucial: “There must be volume for recovered phosphorus to be viable. It can’t be pocket dust.”

Cohen’s lab “accident” as a PhD student resulted in EasyMining’s first patent, for Clean-MAP, a method for extracting ammonium phosphate from mining industry waste. Cohen and his colleague, Patrik Enfält—plus one investor— founded EasyMining in 2007 to commercialize its technologies. Since then, EasyMining has produced several patents, with the help of investment and support from its much older parent company.

Ragn-Sells is Sweden’s biggest waste management, recycling, and environ- mental services company. The three-generation family business has a waste management pedigree dating back to 1881, when Amandus Zakarias Leonard Sellberg set up a haulage company—at first, with just one horse—transporting latrines from central Stockholm to farms in the countryside. In 1928, on his wife Julia’s family farm, Amandus and Julia’s son, Ragnar Sellberg, started a waste collection service for local home-owners. In the 1960s, Sellberg steered the company’s activities into waste management and recycling.

Ragn-Sells’ head office remains at the bucolic (but updated) Väderholmens Gård (farm) in Sollentuna, 11 miles north of Stockholm. On an early June afternoon, birdsong accompanies the hum of a robotic lawn mower ambling over manicured gardens in front of the company’s executive offices in an airy, sunny building. Electric car charging ports adorn the farm buildings—a cluster of wooden barns painted the “Falu red” pigment common in Scandinavia.

Ragnar’s son, Erik Sellberg, Chairman of Ragn-Sells, explains that he never intended to go into the family business: he was studying economics when he seriously injured his knee in a boating accident. In his convalescence he started working with the family firm, and in 1981 he joined Ragn-Sells full time. He invested in EasyMining in 2008, at first only privately, based on a “gut feeling,” In 2014, Ragn-Sells bought EasyMining outright. “I saw that what they do fit into our thinking of how to save resources,” says Sellberg.

“The long-term perspective of a family-owned company is what enables EasyMining to grow and develop,” says Cohen. Ragn-Sells, with its extensive experience in environmental management, is also willing to take the risks and challenges associated with producing new technology at large scale, he adds.

The acquisition of EasyMining, which now has 40 employees based between Uppsala, Gothenburg, and Berlin, aligns with Ragn-Sells’ long-held values. A banner in the office lobby displays a quote by Ragnar Sellberg: I see a beginning where others see an end. Ragn Sells’ and EasyMining’s mission is to help transform our linear economy—in which raw materials are collected, used, and dumped—to a circular economy in which we re-use and recirculate resources as much and for as long as possible. Our waste products contain valuable materials.

“Our strategy as a company is the belief that in the future, there will be no waste,” says Lars Lindén, Ragn-Sells’ CEO.

EasyMining’s roots are in phosphorus recovery, but it also holds patents for recovering other nutrients. Project Nitrogen (a working title) is currently being applied in partnership with BIOFOS—Denmark’s largest wastewater utility—to recover ammonium from wastewater at a demonstration plant in Copenhagen.

Ash2Salt recovers commercial salts from fly ash, which is produced from incinerating waste and usually exported or landfilled, neither of which are sustainable. The new Ash2Salt plant at Högbytorp, a few minutes from Väderholmen, will be fully operational in late 2022 through a licensed agreement with Swiss-Japanese energy-from-waste company Hitachi Zosen Nova. The plant will wash and treat fly ash at large scale to recover several types of commercial salts for de-icing roads and fertilizer, among other uses, and reduce dependence on mined salt.

But perhaps the largest opportunity for recovering nutrients such as phosphorus, right now, is in wastewater. “We want wastewater treatment plants to be the resource plants of the future,” says Pär Larshans, Ragn-Sells’ Director of Sustainability.

Dealing with wastewater—of which sewage is a subset—has been a challenge for as long as humans have gathered in great numbers. In Europe and North America, municipal sanitation systems grew out of the need to reduce typhoid and cholera outbreaks during the Industrial Revolution. London’s Great Stink of 1858—when hot weather and untreated sewage flowing into the Thames resulted in a major cholera outbreak, and made the city smell so bad that Members of Parliament soaked their curtains in chloride of lime—led to the construction of an extensive underground sewage system to convey sewage away from the population.

In the 19th century some cities began treating sewage—by settling it in lagoons, adding oxygen to reduce odor, or adding chemicals—in an effort to reduce water-borne disease outbreaks—a development that led to a huge increase in life expectancy. Starting in the 1840s, some sewage started to be applied to agricultural land as a fertilizer, with some success.

Even today’s treated wastewater contains large amounts of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen—passed from agriculture and fertilizers to food and to our own waste—which is a waste disposal challenge, because they contribute to water pollution and eutrophication, an overgrowth of algae that can turn water bodies toxic. Sewage sludge, a semi-solid byproduct of wastewater treatment, is rich in nutrients but also in pathogens, so it has to be treated before disposal or reuse for agriculture. In most cases it is incinerated, a process that started in the 1930s.

Today, “there are three reasons to incinerate sewage sludge,” explains Cohen. Incineration detoxifies the sludge of pathogens, it increases the concentration of phosphorus (there is 0.8% phosphorus in sewage sludge, but 9% phosphorus in sewage sludge ash, as compared to 1.8% in rock phosphate from Finland’s phosphorus mine), and it reduces weight and volume by 90 percent, making logistics and transport simpler.

EasyMining’s Ash2Phos process—which involves treating sewage sludge ash with a series of chemical reactions employing hydrochloric acid, alkaline, and lime—can recover 90 percent of the phosphorus in sewage sludge ash, with a more than 96% reduction in contaminant heavy metals such as cadmium and uranium. The main substance it recovers is calcium phosphate—equivalent to mined rock phosphate, but with higher purity (mined Moroccan phosphate for instance is high in cadmium).

The process also has lower carbon dioxide emissions compared to sourcing virgin resources. A life-cycle assessment study by the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute concluded that producing the same amount of calcium phosphorus from ash with the Ash2Phos process compared to sourcing it from non-renewable phosphate ore would save 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.

The first Ash2Phos plants—the first in the world that will recover phosphorus at this scale—are in development in Germany and Sweden. The German plant, in Schkopau, is a partnership with utilities company Gelsenwasser and is projected to be completed in 2024.

That’s the recovery side; regulations make the market side a greater challenge. There are three potential routes for the recovered phosphorus that EasyMining obtains: fertilizer, animal feed, and food additives. While the EU is facilitating a move to a circular economy, there remains a legal barrier to achieving this because current EU laws prioritize origin, rather than quality, of phosphorus and other recycled nutrients.

“EasyMining’s recycled phosphorus cannot be used for feed, no matter the quality, and cannot be used for food additives, no matter the quality, because of its origin,” says EasyMining’s Kabbe, in Vienna. This despite that the recycled phosphorus is of higher purity than that in traditional fertilizers.

Products recycled from waste can’t be used for agricultural feed for animals or for food additives. This legal taboo is a relic from the BSE (“mad cow disease”) crisis in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 90s. Back then, however, there was no significant nutrient recycling from waste to be used. “When these laws were written, nobody was doing what we are doing yet,” says Anna Lundbom, EasyMining’s marketing manager.

While there is a market for recycled nutrients for fertilizers in conventional farming, there is also still a ban on their use in organic farming. This would seem to deprive recovered phosphorus of a natural target market. What better evangelists and early adopters of a circular economy than organic farmers and their consumers?

The needle may be slowly moving on that front. The 2022 working program of the EU’s Expert Committee on Organic Farming includes the consideration of allowing some recycled nutrients in organic farming. Should the EU decide to open the directive, it will be possible to apply for an exemption from the law, explains Larshans, although ideally the law itself would change.

This change in attitude, says Larshans, could be “an important starting point for future sustainable farming.” With that shift, by 2025 EasyMining could be able to supply organic farmers with recycled organic fertilizers.

Ludwig Hermann of the European Sustainable Phosphorus Platform is a little more cautious in his optimism. “So far, nothing has happened, but some movement seems to be detectable,” he says.

There are other challenges to the wider application of nutrient recovery technology. Hermann mentions two: cost and risk perception.

“There will be a cost increase, albeit small, for phosphorus recovery, and a debate about who pays, which will probably be citizens, probably through wastewater treatment,” says Hermann. “In Austria, we have an annual bill for wastewater treatment. From 300 euros a year, it might be 303 euros,” he says.

But politicians will be reluctant to impose costs, no matter how little, he points out, particularly with the current energy and inflation issues.

At present, there is also limited experience with large-scale phosphorus- recovery. “Because it is not yet widely available, there is an additional risk perception,” says Hermann. Still, his feeling is that EasyMining’s plants in Germany and Sweden will set the ball rolling in the rest of Europe, and elsewhere.

“It is quite challenging to set up large-scale production of new processes to move to a circular economy,” says Cohen. “In addition to the main recovered product, you need to develop and find offtakes for all by-products, and in contrast to the mining industry, any disposal of residues will require, in several countries, paying landfill tax.”

It’s difficult to compete with the traditional way of producing fertilizers, he adds. For example, OCP, Morocco’s largest phosphorus producer, simply discharges the waste into the sea at low cost.

Legislation for recovering phosphorus is creating a market—in Europe at least—for wider implementation. In 2006, Switzerland enacted a law to make

the recovery of phosphorus from slaughterhouse waste and sewage sludge obligatory. Germany—which has the most sewage sludge ash in Europe—has introduced a phosphorus recovery law stipulating that wastewater treatment plants above a certain capacity will have to recover phosphorus from sewage sludge by 2029, and have a plan for doing so in 2023.

Austria has been considering a law for phosphorus recovery, but it is not yet mandatory. Still, on June 19, 2022—the day before the city hosted the ESPC— Vienna’s City Hall announced its own plans to recover phosphorus from sewage sludge ash. The City of Vienna’s local authority and Wien Energie, Austria’s largest energy provider—which already incinerates wastewater and garbage for reuse at its surreal, Hundertwasser-designed Wonka’s Chocolate Factory of a plant in Vienna’s 9th district—plan to build and operate a plant to process sewage sludge ash by 2030.

Nicole Puzsar, head of public relations for Stadt Wien, or City of Vienna, says the first crude plans for recovering phosphorus in Vienna date back to 2015. “A well-functioning waste management economy has always been a high priority for Vienna, which also considers itself a pioneer in the field of the circular economy,” says Puzsar.

Above all, partnerships across fields and borders are necessary for moving towards nutrient recovery and to a circular economy. “Cooperation, knowledge, technology, and expertise-sharing is the key to making this work,” says Larshans. “Market demand is there, policies are on their way, but we need to speed up the process,” he adds.

EasyMining’s Kabbe describes it as a “push-pull” process between industry, innovation, and science, and getting regulators and policymakers on board. “The costs on the market level are competitive,” he says. “Now, it’s a political question.”

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In rural British Columbia, Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society is harnessing the power of poop.

ABBOTSFORD, BRITISH COLUMBIA—

It takes no more than an Uber ride with the window down across Abbotsford, B.C. to notice that you are in Canada’s agricultural capital. The scent of Cedar and Spruce that envelops most of the Fraser Valley, the Southwestern region of British Columbia that neighbors Washington State, is overpowered by the farm smells of wheat, fresh grass and, especially, cow feed—in all parts of its cycle.

The odor of cow manure grows faint to new visitors after a few days, and some locals don’t detect it at all, but, despite living in the area for years, Chris Bush couldn’t leave it alone. That odor was a sign of a problem with local agriculture; one he wondered if he could fix.

Back then, he was an account manager losing interest in his job selling two-way radios at a regional telecom company. One night, trying to disconnect from work, he read a sidebar story in Popular Science Magazine about a farm in Vermont that made electricity from cow manure—the same dung he’d get a faint whiff of every morning on his drive to work. A lightbulb turned on in his mind.

“We have massive amounts of manure lying around, and our environment is suffering from it,” he says. “It seemed to me like there was a gigantic gap between what is being done and what’s possible here in Abbotsford.”

Bush was right. The chickens and cows of the province of British Columbia produce nearly three billion kilograms of manure every year: about enough to fill a full-sized American football stadium to its top. And Abbotsford, with its 25,000 cows and nine million chickens, produced far more waste than the city of 160,000 people could handle. Much of it would get shipped to the prairies as fertilizer or, worse, dumped in abundance on local crops and nearby rivers, filling the soil, air, and water with methane: a compound that, liter for liter, traps 80 times more heat in our atmosphere than the carbon dioxide puffing from our car exhausts. Cow waste would even trickle down the Abbotsford aquifer and flow downstream towards Washington State at a rate that made American farmers complain about their up-north neighbors. Abbotsford had a manure problem, and Bush wanted to deal with it.

He wondered if there was a way to make good use of all that manure. It was a prescient thought: recycling on-site farm waste would only become a more relevant global challenge in the 15 years to come. The nitrogen fertilizer used by many farmers then and now—the kind that tripled global grain production over the last 50 years—continues to dwindle in its supply, even before supplies from Russia became squeezed by the war. Couple a worldwide fertilizer shortage with a supply chain still wobbly from the pandemic, and you get expensive and scarce food for plants and, in consequence, smaller crop sizes. 

Bush was fascinated by how some small farms fermented their manure and transformed it into fertilizer, all while capturing the methane in the waste and using it to power their homes. But many of these farms did so in isolation. He wondered if he could find a way to scale the transformation of manure into gas and fertilizer, to serve many farms at once.

The key to his dream was something called a biogas plant, which is a network of oxygen-free tanks called anaerobic digesters that take in manure and ferment it at nearly 40 degrees Celsius for three to four weeks. The process replicates what happens in a cow’s third stomach: the manure separates into solid and gas. When that happens in the stomach of a cow, it farts. A biogas plant, in contrast, turns that gas into usable fuel and funnels it into the power grid. And as a bonus: the solid that remains is odorless and can be used as fertilizer for crops.

Some farms in British Columbia were using small biogas plants, and the technology was particularly strong in Europe. But to do this on a grander scale, he would need to build an industrial-sized biogas plant. The price tag: around $6 million. He needed to win over his neighbors, some of whom were worried about the smell or traffic. More than anything, though, he needed investors, but the idea was so new in the mid-aughts that there wasn’t even terminology for the kind of zero-carbon farming he was contemplating.

“Back then, nobody had the sexy language,” says Bush. “I’d tell people I want to power the city with cow poop, and they’d look at me like I was a nutjob.”

Still, Bush could not shake the idea. So, in the wake of the 2008 recession, he sold the family home and moved with his wife, eight-year-old twin boys, and six-year-old daughter to East Abbotsford. With the remaining equity from his house, his entire savings of $500,000, and $4 million in research grants and investor money that he finally tracked down, he built a farm and a biogas plant, with the goal of powering community homes with Abbotsford’s abundance of manure.

“We had planned another baby, but went for the anaerobic digester instead… we even had a picture of it next to those of the kids on our fridge,” he says. “We put everything into this.”

Bush’s initial results, especially for an ex-telecom specialist, were auspicious. It took him barely two years to build a working biogas plant, capture energy from cow droppings and convert it to electricity. In 2010, his plant became the first in North America to extract gas from cow manure and sell it to utility from a farm—the 126^th plant on earth to do so, he says with a grin.

What would eventually make his plant special, he thought, was scale. Many biogas systems across the world already produced enough energy to sustain themselves. Bush had a grander idea: what if he eventually developed a biogas plant that could power an entire community? Arguably, no country needed this technology more than Canada, one of the top manure-producing countries in the world, without a blueprint to dispose of it in an environmentally friendly way.

The investment was huge, but the finances appeared simple: he had to produce $2,500 of gas per day for six months to break even. Any profits would go toward funding his brainchild, the Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society: a consortium of people dedicated to advancing the environmental and economic sustainability of agriculture, hopefully, one day based in a research and innovation center.

But his operation soon struggled: in the first 18 months, it averaged only $1,000 in profits per day. People were not buying the gas; machines would often break and need repair; and Bush, experimenting with cow, hog, and chicken manure, was still far away from nailing the recipe for maximum gas production.

“Every month, I’d sell off a little more to my investor group to keep the plant going, and then when I ran out of shares to sell, I had to sell the plant. Financially, it was catastrophic for me… I was broken when it died.”

A former business partner bought the biogas plant from Bush in 2012, giving the then demoralized 40-year-old the chance to cleanly exit the farming world and start fresh. But Bush found himself unable to walk away from his goal: he figured his idea was the right one, but that it just needed better execution.

“I recognized I am an addict to this vision. I mean, I had already sold the house,” he says.

“It had become more important for me that the project worked than that economically I survived. We need this. The world needs this.”

Now, 15 years after reading the Popular Science Magazine sidebar, and ten years after losing much of his life’s savings, Bush remains at work, and the Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society is alive as a four-person operation.

On most days, Bush drives ten minutes westbound from the home he now rents with his wife to the Bakerview Farm Eco-dairy, a small dairy farm with a biogas plant that he and his team now use as a research headquarters. The parking lot there is full of families, gathered around the front-facing on-site ice cream shop.

“The front end is what pulls the people in. Us,” he says with a slight smile, “we work at the back end.”

Behind the ice cream shop is a modest-looking collection of barns engulfed in a scent of manure that penetrates even the hardened nostrils of any local Abbotsfordian. A blue-grey barn on the right houses 50 cows, each with a yellow name tag on their right ear. Colleen, Alexis, Daffodil, and their contemporaries all face away from a dung-caked pit lined with a steel trough, which carries the fresh cow waste outside towards a network of bungalow-sized barns and trailers.

“You have to follow the poop to see the magic,” says Bush.

The eco-dairy is more eco than dairy: the buildings behind the cow barn hide the biggest active anaerobic digestion facility in all of Canada. Trailers propped up on two-foot stilts and packed with scientific equipment.

Those trailers contain $5M CAD ($3.8M USD) worth of equipment: 15 half-liter bottles connected to a chromatograph and monitor, eight 20-liter vats kept inside cupboards, two cylindrical 400-liter anaerobic digesters lining the walls, and six 1500-liter digesters kept inside a 38-degree fermentation room in the back. In its own barn is one big horizontal 85,000-liter digester that Bush calls Bertha.

Each container is filled with a fermenting, charcoal-colored manure mixture—roughly three parts cow, chicken, and hog excrement, and one-part industrial food processing waste—Bush calls it poop soup.

The machines take 25 days to digest the mix and funnel its gas into the utility grid. Ultimately the gas powers 1000 homes and businesses across the province. The manure, meanwhile, after it gets stripped of its methane, becomes environmentally-friendly fertilizer for nearby crops.

Bush is no longer solo on his mission to make waste less wasteful: he has teamed up with James Irwin, a serial entrepreneur, bio-chemist, and CEO of the agricultural research corporation Point 3 Biotech Corp. Before joining forces with Bush, Irwin used anaerobic digestion on microalgae to extract astaxanthin, an antioxidant with a red pigment that he yielded so purely it would sometimes come out as purple.

“A few people said, hey, you’re like the Walter White of Precision Agriculture,” says Irwin, “because of the blue meth, or whatever. I don’t know—I’ve never watched the show.”

Irwin had also used anaerobic digestion on microalgae to make biodiesel, and later to convert fats from agricultural waste into renewable natural gas. Bush wondered if the scientist’s expertise in collecting usable gas from organic materials would complement his own goals. So, they became business partners.

“Chris is the visionary at Catalyst, and I bring the research,” says Irwin. “He is building the car, and I’m assembling the pieces.”

The team expanded again in the last three years by hiring lab technician Travis Scott, and principal investigator Suman Adhikary, then a Concordia master’s graduate and previously a lecturer at Sonargaon University in Bangladesh. Adhikary’s job, complex in application, sounds simple in theory: create the best manure recipe for gas production.

“Now we try a bunch of recipes to put in the digesters,” says Adhikary. “Sometimes it’s half-chicken with 20 percent cow and hog. Sometimes it’s less chicken because too much chicken manure produces enough ammonia to inhibit methane production. Sometimes it’s mostly cow… we’re still tinkering.”

Adhikary and the team iterate their mixture based on their own findings and the outcomes that emerge from European plants. Bush has traveled overseas to consult with his Swedish and German counterparts about their own mixtures of choice and is closely following new work from Germany that uses green hydrogen to convert carbon dioxide into methane and increase the overall gas yield from digesters.

While Catalyst primarily uses the plant for research, it is still performing much better than Bush’s first iteration.

 “It’s simple: more gas, more money, and this plant is making $5,000 a day,” he says.
 “Financially, though, we still haven’t recovered from 2012.”

The final part of Bush’s vision requires a little collaboration with the neighbors. The team at Catalyst has an idea of converting their demonstrative research project into a community-scale manure management initiative, in which they would have large community biogas plants built to digest and ferment manure of several local farms. The plants would be co-owned: Catalyst would be responsible for their maintenance and upgrades, while the farmers would operate the machine. Bush figures such partnerships would be win-win-wins: farmers who face increasing pressure to restrict their environmental damage would receive professional help in mitigating their footprint, Catalyst would grow its business, and ultimately, Mother Nature would benefit, too.

“That way, farmers don’t have to go into it blindly and risk building a biogas plant by themselves—I know what that’s like,” says Bush. “Here, we’d both share the risk and the reward.”

It’s easy to get local farmers and businesses to buy into small-scale collaborations, like collecting grains from local breweries to feed cows, which Bush does regularly. But the bigger ideas, like powering your home with gas from animal waste, or convincing a farmer to build a multi-million-dollar anaerobic digester on their farm, tend not to be as easily adopted. Resistance to change is the biggest hurdle Bush’s ideas continue to face.

“When it comes to innovations in agriculture, the potential users need to be sure whatever is new is bulletproof before they make a move,” says Mike Manion, an executive in residence with agri-business accelerator IAFBC Agri business accelerator. “Change, without years of investigation and proof that it works, can make farmers fearful.”

But the province’s farming industry, according to experts, is in dire need of fixing. The Canadian federal government announced in July it was looking for ways to cut fertilizer emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Local fertilizer is already running low. The pandemic and extreme weather of the last few years, which included record-breaking forest fires and destructive floods, compromised common supply chains with the prairies and California, and made fertilizer prices in the province skyrocket, says Lenore Newman, Director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley.

“As a result, we’re in unprecedented territory in food loss in B.C. and in Canada: last winter, across the province, we had no lettuce on our shelves,” she says. “The only way we can ensure there is food security here is to produce domestically, more intensively, and year-round.”

For those reasons, using local waste to grow more crops without spewing methane into the air could become paramount. Couple that with a provincial renewable gas subsidy program for B.C. residents to power their homes with biogas, and it would seem that the technology’s moment has arrived.

“At all levels of new farming tech, it takes that sort of government push to see progress,” says Manion. “I keep trying to encourage Chris, because his ideas were about 15 years ahead of the curve, and now the environment is different out there… people just might start paying more attention to his work.”

Manion sees the immediate importance of in-house manure fermentation: making one’s own fertilizer can help protect against global supply issues. But there are still only three working digesters in all of B.C. For the technology to become mainstream, it must first become cheaper and adopted by more trailblazers. If the research efforts at Catalyst lead to installing more industrial-sized, trusted, affordable biogas plants on nearby farms, it could open the floodgates.

“We need solutions to make home-grown fertilizer,” he says. “Agriculture is at a precipice—a turning point—and they might just be at the forefront of it.”

Thirty minutes inland from Abbotsford and the Bakerview eco-dairy, in the mountainside agricultural city of Chilliwack, is a massive construction site that is slowly developing the largest biogas plant in Canada. Once ready, the plant is expected to produce enough energy from manure to power approximately 4,000 homes, and also to recover nine million gallons of water per year from manure remnants via reverse osmosis and mineral rebalancing. Once operational, it will dwarf Bush’s research facility in gas production.

The $40-million CAD ($30.5M USD) project was just an idea in George Dick’s mind back in 2008, when the entrepreneur and dairy farmer at Dicklands Farms came across a magazine article about Bush’s own biogas project.

“I thought, where did this guy come from? We have the same idea!” says Dick. “And he’s going through with it.”

Dick paid close attention to Bush’s trailblazing attempt to build a plant in the early 2010s, and witnessed the project’s first iteration bleed money and go out of business.

“I saw Chris fail… it was such a new technology, and we knew even less about it then than we do now,” says Dick. “Someone had to take those first steps forward, even if they were risky.”

After a decade of research, fundraising, and building, Dick is now months away from seeing his own years-long project come to life: the Dicklands Farms biogas plant is expected to be up and running by April 2023. If the plant functions as expected, it may be Dick, and not Bush, that will be remembered as the father of biogas in British Columbia, and possibly in Canada.

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese,” says Bush. “Sometimes that’s the price of going first.”

But to Bush, a successful outcome at Dicklands Farms would feel like a win nonetheless. He wants he and his partners at Catalyst to pioneer research into biogas farming and scale their own operation, but more than anything, he wants his city’s manure problem to be solved. Whether he is the face of the movement or the shoulders on which another innovator will stand, he longs to see the vision that pulled him away from his regular life materialize.

Besides, he says, the stakes are higher than personal glory.

 “More than anything, this is about a mission: powering the world and solving one of the grand challenges of humanity,” he says.

“I’ll be the guy to lead it, or I’ll be a soldier on somebody else’s team. Either way, I’m calling this my life’s work.”

More on Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society

So much of American life can be improved by reducing food waste. ReFED can help.

TRUCKEE, CALIFORNIA, USA

Dana Gunders is groan-laughing, despite herself. For the last hour, the conversation in a Truckee, California, grocery store café lounge has focused on the impact of food waste on human beings and our environment, “food waste” appearing at first blush to be a mild, if approachable term for a few ingredients not making it into a dinner recipe at their peak. In fact, food waste refers to a massive systemic issue across every aspect of how we make, transport, buy, prepare, and dispose of food and its byproducts. Gunders, as executive director of ReFED, the leading nonprofit in this arena, is constantly thinking about the food we don’t eat: the produce that rots in fields unharvested or in transport to point of sale, the bulk purchases that expire in hotel and restaurant walk-ins, the ugly fruit at the farmer’s market that never gets chosen, the government-mandated portions in school lunches that may not be a fit for your 8-year-old’s appetite.

How to talk about food waste, it turns out, is a major part of resolving a crisis that denies access that millions of people could have to affordable healthy food, contributes to high quantities of greenhouse emissions, and increases the cost of food overall. And so, if there is anything funny to be said about food waste, it’s that the term doesn’t convey the scope of the challenge. “It’s a terrible term,” Gunders says, her laugh extending into a sigh as she slides the base of her palm across her eyelids. “People understand it very quickly, though not always correctly.”

It could be said that the United States has consistently struggled to manage its food system effectively and consistently. In 2021, as one marker, more than ten percent of Americans (13.5 million households) weren’t sure whether they’d have food on a given day. And yet, the U.S. tosses out about 35% of its food supply, or about 80 million tons, a number that Gunders describes as “ridiculous.” She considers other terms: “We talk about ‘surplus food’ a lot because it’s not waste until you waste it, right? What we really want is for there to be less surplus in the first place, and then for it not to go to waste.”

The good news about food waste is that, at least by Gunders’ standards, nobody wakes up committed to throwing food away. In a society where the bottom lines are treated as gospel, no business wants to buy food unnecessarily and have it not be consumed. Since its beginnings seven years ago, ReFED has been the sole national nonprofit dedicated to significantly reducing food waste, with aims to cut that 80 million ton in half by 2030. This won’t just save food, it could limit global warming and remake the food system into something far more inclusive and not inherently mired in systemic injustices.

To study food waste is to realize how it touches, and is touched by, every part of our lives.

From data to action

ReFED first formed in 2015, but its history really started with a foundational report that came a year later: the 2016 Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent. It was part analysis, part action plan, and part acknowledgment of the severity of the issue. “It’s really about examining the food system to understand where waste is designed into it,” Gunders said. “And how do we find ways to design it out?”

It also introduced one of the core creative tensions facing the organization: how to produce data, great data even, but always with an eye on making sure that data translates into action. “Lord knows we don’t want to sit around and create reports that sit on shelves and nobody uses,” says Gunders. “Our ultimate goal is to have people do stuff with that information.”

First things first. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”, as Gunders puts it, so the organization compiled data sets and built an open-source data and insights engine. A robust toolkit that’s been used by government agencies, retailers, farmers, and many other stakeholders, the engine allows users to discover what actual documented issues currently exist, to research existing solutions and providers working on those issues now, and to calculate what impact those efforts may have.

One key action it’s meant to spur is donation. Impact investors, notably Jesse Fink, the founder of Priceline, were at the heart of the organization’s founding. Current funders include huge corporations and foundations like General Mills, Hellmann’s, Deloitte, and the Walmart Foundation. That insights engine? Sponsored by the Kroger Co. Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation. This June’s announcement that ReFED would help launch the $100M Circular Food Solutions Funding Platform was the culmination of years of efforts to build structures around how they channel money.

“Anyone who’s interested in this topic, anyone who’s a funder, can participate in education and deal flow,” says Gunders. “And anytime an organization is looking for money, we put that on a list and send it out to all of these groups and it helps kind of grease the wheels of the whole system.”

Emily Broad Leib, Founding Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, says ReFED is a critical platform for everyone interested in attacking this problem. “ReFED is really at the center of building that ecosystem, of maintaining that network, and keeping all the other stakeholders engaged,” she says. “They’re the group that’s field-building, the hub for all the spokes in this issue.”

Leib helps maintain the policy finder for ReFED, in part because the ReFED site is the most visible space in the food waste community, a digital watering hole for powerful groups who want to help and groups on the ground who are already helping.

So despite their relatively small size—just 20 employees—ReFED seems well positioned to effect change throughout the entire food system. Which would be nice, since, well, the system is so convoluted, so far from ideal. Take, for example, food waste and hunger. Right now, food banks, soup kitchens and churches rely heavily on food donations to feed those who are food insecure, a group that disproportionately comprises communities of color. So food waste… fights hunger?

“If I were going to design the food system from scratch,” says Gunders. “I would not design it so that the way we feed people who can’t feed themselves is to just over-buy and over-consume and then [donate the food] later in its life… what we really want is a food system that’s so efficient that we don’t have that surplus. And acknowledge that it is our social responsibility to have everyone in our country fed.”

She describes meeting a leader in food surplus issues in the Netherlands who was perplexed even at the idea of donating large amounts of uneaten food. There simply aren’t enough hungry mouths to feed in a country that prioritizes feeding the poor. So instead, they can focus sharply on reducing surplus without worrying about downstream impacts on hunger.

But that is the Netherlands. In the United States, tackling food waste can involve a very delicate political and economic dance. Gunders recently testified in front of Congress and says that Michelle Obama’s 2012 school lunch guidelines came up, once again. The familiar talking point was that anyone who put more fresh vegetables in school lunches must not be against food waste, since children just throw the vegetables out. “It’s not okay to use waste as this argument against feeding people well,” says Gunders. “How about this: make the food taste better.”

For all the institutional and financial muscle of ReFED, though, one of their greatest assets is the understanding that big fixes in food waste sometimes start small. Yes, there are large-scale packaging solutions, and more private sector technology deployed against food waste than ever (food waste tech companies raised $1.9B in 2021, shattering old records). But according to Harvard’s Leib, small-scale, sometimes even personal, solutions are key.

“The actual process of addressing food waste happens at a local scale,” Leib says. “If we want to meet the 2030 goal of reducing food waste by 50%, we’re not going to get there unless we leverage what other people are doing on the ground. Some solutions are low-tech, and for those it’s about getting the message out. Otherwise, you’re just reinventing the wheel throughout the country.”

As Gunders puts it, ReFED is by design very “manual” on the solutions side. “We’re just reaching out as we hear about cool things that people are doing or cool companies or cool nonprofits that are doing something in this space,” she says. “Then we extrapolate from there: if scaled up, this could actually save, for example, 40 tons of food across the country and here’s how much it would cost to do it, and here’s how many greenhouse gases would be saved… it’s all a model we’re estimating, but we’re trying to paint some kind of picture to help people prioritize what they can do.”

Individual choice is also a confounding factor. Gunders says her favorite stat comes from a survey that found that 75% of Americans waste less food than the average American. That is, people always underestimate how much food they themselves waste. What they don’t realize is that small choices, such as putting out an overabundance of food at a house party, may make them feel good, may even be key to their self-identity as good hosts, but should be viewed also in light of food waste. Your individual desire to not leave any guest potentially hungry is closely related to desire that shoppers have to see supermarket shelves always full, even if that means guaranteed food waste or the resulting higher prices. Expectations and behavior alike need to readjusting, starting with each consumer.

Leib says that’s why the scaling up of all these smaller solutions is so key. “We’ve already seen a lot of preliminary successes coming from ReFED’s work,” she says. “But into the future, the change needs to be exponential.” In a world where food waste is responsible for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, she says, solutions both big and small need to be expanded as rapidly as possible.

A dream in DC

When the pandemic took root in the U.S. in early 2020, it exposed the vulnerabilities of the American food system—from indefinitely delayed supply chains to forced closures of business that serve or store food, which led to massive losses. ReFED saw an opportunity to create a rapid response fund to get money flowing to organizations already engaged with those communities most affected, ultimately delivering more than $3.5 million to 37 for-profit and nonprofit organizations. The effort helped to collectively keep more than 50 million pounds from being wasted during a critical period of the pandemic. In Washington, D.C, one such organization is Dreaming Out Loud (DOL), which was able to make 70,000 meals and deliver groceries to 1,300 recipients each week through November 2020 thanks to fund resources provided by ReFED.

When Taylor Lewis began at DOL in February of this year, he was tasked with managing the Farm at Kelly Miller, a two-acre urban space atop a grassy hill, tucked behind a middle school in Washington D.C.’s Ward 7. His first mandate: to assess the site’s operations and workflows as the farm had become a beacon of community engagement since his employer launched it in 2018. Amid cordoned off row crops, in-progress digging, irrigation installation, a slew of raised beds, and a compost area, the farm produces fruits, veggies, and herbs to stock DOL’s aggregated farm-share, wholesale markets, and “U-Picks,” where community members of all ages harvest their own goods.

The Kelly Miller property would be Lewis’s first urban farming experience after five years tilling soil, two of them in a rural village in Ghana living with expat friends following a turn in the U.S. Navy. Suddenly Lewis found himself forced to live off the land in ways he hadn’t previously thought about. “For the first time I experienced what it meant to truly reap what you sow,” he said, seated underneath a shady tent one July morning. “You put a single seed in the ground, and it produces pounds of food. I felt fulfilled. I got into a more organic or natural rhythm of doing things and I realized this was something I might be doing for the rest of my life.”

DOL builds community-driven food systems through not only cooperatively supplying healthy foods targeted toward those who are most likely to be exposed to systemic harm, but by creating economically viable opportunities within the food system for those same residents. When Christopher Bradshaw founded the organization in 2008, it was with a clear eye on how food has been politicized in the D.C. Metro area, which is to say, the United States.

To understand the mechanisms of how food as a business operates in the U.S. is to understand that this country has never embraced the responsibility of feeding its people—all of its people. From forcibly removing indigenous peoples off of ancestral land in their care, and owing to an agricultural legacy born out of slavery, food was not intended to ensure a country’s inhabitants receive nourishment or delight in pleasure. Rather, food became incentive to expand territories and acted as fuel to extract maximum results from a disposable labor pool robbed of their identities. The social caste hierarchy rooted in the eras of western expansion and enslavement is apparent in the weaponizing of food that brings us through the 21^st century: the eradication of indigenous methods of tending to the land as the government pushed Native people to reservations; sharecropping where Black Americans were trapped in cycles of debt and access to food was restricted often to counter efforts to vote; the abuse of migrant farm laborers, many hailing from Central and South America, and the growing doom of food apartheid, the accurate term for what is often misnamed “food deserts,” where folks who are systemically blocked from living in certain areas find themselves miles away from grocers with healthy, appealing options.

DOL assessed the results of this brutal history and envisioned a path toward food security, including teaching urban agriculture skills to residents made vulnerable by these systemic issues. For that to happen, they would need to shepherd farmers, makers, and sellers into an integrated and transparent process that maximizes their effort and limits unnecessary losses. One way to do this is to aggregate produce from smaller farmers in the region to sell wholesale, distribute through the CSA, and retail at their markets. Or pre-purchasing from such farmers, which provides sustainability, lowers the farmer’s operating costs, and prevents them having to add labor to the retail side of their business. Without DOL, most of those farmers would not be able to produce enough food to make the investment worthwhile, or they would get stymied by frustrations like not having the cash to purchase cold storage to reserve and transport harvest waiting to be sold. Such was the case with a farmer in North Carolina whose story a DOL staffer related, who was harvesting his crops all day, leaving them to sit outside overnight, then driving 90 miles to market. Inevitably his routine was unsustainable, both due to the physical strain but also the loss of quality in his hard-earned harvest.

DOL’s approach is to operate as a food hub that actually has skin in the game and knows the community they’re supporting. For example, they know that many of the heads of household who shop at the market at Kelly Miller are seniors, so they established a convenient drive-thru option. And recognizing that folks who pay with government assistance still want the sovereignty of picking and choosing which carrots or bell peppers go in their box ensures that all DOL staffers and volunteers are trained to know their produce and treat all customers with dignity and respect. It’s these types of efforts, from the herculean physical feats of moving thousands of pounds of food, to the mundane of setting up processes that flow smoothly, that reduce the risk of food waste across every farmer, company, organization, and household that touches DOL’s system. This is the kind of impact ReFED aims to have anywhere people have access to their solutions.

Food sovereignty, food security, environmental protection, racial justice, better health outcomes: so many things could be improved by what ReFED is trying to achieve.

Harvard’s Leib offers a blunter rationale for supporting ReFED’s mission against food waste. “It’s just a stupid problem,” she says. “Nobody is benefitting from this.”