Why Robin Needs To Exist
How it all began
After our third back-to-back conference call in a row with a London council representative, talking about waste management (of all things!), I sat back in my chair feeling simultaneously exhausted, annoyed and excited in equal measure. Sitting at a table strewn with compostable bin liners, caddy bins, research papers and books on food waste and climate change, whilst spending most of my days talking to waste professionals, I wondered how my life had taken this sudden 90 degree turn over the last 3 months, where I now find myself completely immersed in this brand new world.
Rewinding back to the start of the year in January, my co-founder Nic and I had been busy wrapping up the final bits and bobs that would result in us exiting from the software startup we had founded and run together for the previous 5+ years. This was something in the making since early 2019 when we had both been questioning the wider impact we wanted to have on the world and the types of businesses we wanted to build. Coming to the realisation that we wanted to spend our time working on projects we were truly passionate about, and that was going some ways to helping solve some of the world’s biggest problems, we knew we needed to make a big change and focus our time and effort on starting something new.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
We believe the biggest challenge facing humanity right now is global warming and climate change. Delving into the research, we learnt that one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions is the food industry, starting from the production of food, right through to how it’s then disposed of. We are clearly (and thankfully!) not the first people to try to combat the worst culprits of the food industry, and we are heartened every day to see more and more information coming out in support of ideas like moving towards a plant-based diet and away from big agriculture with unsustainable farming practices. As evidence grows and consumers become more aware of their impact on their environment, we’ve noticed more and more companies offering alternative options to the status quo, led by growing consumer demand. For instance, there are now more options than ever, for plant-based diets or channels to buy direct from farmers. As individual consumers, we each have the power to vote with our wallets and collectively drive the change we want to see in companies and how they impact the wider society.
In helping us figure out what climate change related problem we wanted to help tackle, we arranged call after call. After call. After call. After speaking to over a hundred people to try to understand what their biggest blockers are to being environmentally-friendly whilst living in a big city like London, we noticed that food waste recycling was a topic that kept coming up again and again.
More than 50% of households in London are flats, and the vast majority of them will not have sufficient outdoor space to recycle their food scraps into compost. This means they have to rely on their councils to offer a food waste collection service and trust that they then recycle the food waste in an environmentally responsible way.
So what happens then, if a council doesn’t offer a food waste collection and recycling service?
“But that’s ridiculous - of course your council will offer food waste collection if you request it!”, I hear you all say.
A completely reasonable assumption, but unfortunately not the case in reality. Living in a flat in Southwark for the last 10 years, I have repeatedly asked my council across the years to provide my block of flats with a collection service, only to be met with a dead-end every single time. I was always annoyed (and perplexed) as to why this was, considering the kerb-side houses on a neighbouring street seemed to get the service no problem. Nic meanwhile, has been living in Wandsworth in a kerb-side terraced house conversion. His council’s response was that all food waste needs to be collected with residual waste, to be sent for incineration. Speaking to other Londoners across a range of councils, it’s clear to us that we do not live in council anomalies - councils either: (i) do not offer a food waste collection service at all; or (ii) do offer a service, but only to kerb-side houses (i.e. excludes flats or flats above shops).
But why? And how do we change this?
This brings us back to the start of this post, where Nic and I have been speaking to council after council in London to try to get to the root of the problem. We started the process feeling aggrieved (“We pay the same council tax, why can’t we get the same service!”) but this lessened the more we came to realise how complex the entire situation actually is. We’ve since spoken to other stakeholders beyond residents and councils, including waste contractors (3rd party companies who have contracts with councils for collecting and/or disposing waste), London Waste Authorities (responsible for disposing waste after collection), anaerobic digestion facilities (which takes food waste and converts it to biogas and fertiliser) and biogas industry bodies. Call, after call, after call. All to try to figure out the answers to two big questions.
​
-
How important is it for us, as a society, to recycle our food waste? Or put another way, what’s the impact if we carry on with the status quo?; and
-
Will the government or local authorities be able to solve this problem and offer a food waste recycling service to all households, in the near future?
How important is recycling our food waste, really?
Starting with the first question, we looked into what happens to food waste that’s disposed of with general waste. It differs by council but what largely tends to happen is that general waste is ultimately incinerated in “energy from waste” plants. General waste is otherwise sent to landfills.
Considering that food waste sent to landfill releases methane that is 84x more potent than carbon dioxide from a warming perspective, this practice needs to be stopped imminently. Unless some element of anaerobic digestion is included as part of the pre-processing of waste, prior to the waste being sent for incineration, this process is net energy consumptive. Any energy captured from incineration is non-renewable. Furthermore, organic waste (i.e. food or garden waste) that could have been broken down to soil fertiliser or compost and recycled back to the earth, once incinerated, no longer exists.
​
Food waste sent to landfill releases methane that is 84x more potent than carbon dioxide.
The alternative to sending food waste to landfill or for incineration is to send it to an anaerobic digestion facility. This process breaks down food waste to produce biogas (a renewable source of energy) and digestate (which can be used as soil conditioner or further decomposed down to compost). This is a net energy producing process AND recycles nutrients back to the earth, from which more food can be produced. This is therefore a much more sustainable way to dispose of our food waste, in a way that moves us towards a circular economy where waste is recycled to kickstart the circle of food production again. Considering the increasing problem we are facing with diminishing top soil, poor soil nutrient quality (resulting in nutrient-poor foods) and the detrimental effects of synthetic fertilisers, the recycling of food back to the ground is a crucial part of this process, the importance of which cannot be stressed enough.
Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a process that is well known and utilised throughout Europe, and within some councils in the UK, and is the preferred disposal method for food waste as recommended by the EU and UK’s DEFRA.
To make this more relatable, we did some back of the envelope calculations to compare the effects of sending food waste to landfill or for incineration, as opposed to AD.
-
An average 2-person household in London diverting one week’s worth of food waste (around 3kg) from landfill to AD, is equivalent to removing carbon equivalent emissions of 16 car miles.
-
If food waste was diverted from all London households, this would be equivalent to 2.7 billion car miles per year. (That’s 14 return journeys to the sun!)
-
Incineration fares better than landfill dumping, but across all London households, we’d still be able to save 305 million car miles per year, if the food waste was sent to AD facilities instead.
-
Research has shown that a tree has the potential to offset around 58 kg CO2 over a 20 year period. Using this assumption implies that a single household diverting food waste from landfill to AD, would be equivalent to planting 113 trees.
Can’t I just wait for my council to offer this service?
In an ideal world, councils would offer a food waste recycling service to all households, as standard. Unfortunately, we live in a world with financial, infrastructural and political barriers, where local authority budgets are continuously being squeezed and long term waste management contracts in place means that the status quo is likely to prevail.
As part of our research, we came across an environment bill that requires all local authorities to offer a weekly food waste collection service to all households by 2023. We were initially really excited to hear about this as it felt like a solution was on the horizon… but soon found out that “all households” actually just means kerb-side properties and flats that can be serviced in an economically viable way. As to what “economically viable” actually means, there’s no clear definition on that. Speaking to councils about this, our initial excitement turned to disappointment as it has become clear that most councils intend to only start (or continue) providing a service to kerb-side properties, leaving flats to fall within the “non-economically viable” loophole.
Whilst it might sound like we’re blaming the councils, we’re not. Immersing ourselves deep within the food waste recycling world, we’ve come to understand just how complex it all is, and just how many different stakeholders and varied incentives there are, driving the agenda. Furthermore, in these devastating COVID-19 times with budgets and attention being focussed to frontline services (understandably), we are even more unlikely to see councils allocate more resources to food waste collection and recycling.
Photo by Markus Distelrath from Pexels
In the meantime however, there is the very immediate problem of a significant number of us Londoners unwillingly sending our food waste and scraps either to landfill, or to be burnt - with immediate and significant carbon emissions. This is why we feel so strongly that an alternative option for food waste recycling has to exist.
Whilst we try to do our best to offset our personal carbon emissions through supporting great initiatives like tree planting, that drawdown carbon already circulating in our atmosphere, we’ve realised that there’s a step that comes before this. Prevention is always better than the cure. To the extent that we can prevent these emissions from even being released in the first place, and better still, actually go further and drawdown carbon from improving soil health, this really feels like something we have to try and make happen.
As individual consumers, we each have the power to vote with our wallets and collectively drive the change we want to see in companies and how they impact the wider society. If you believe in what Robin is trying to do, we’d love for you to join us in fighting for what we believe is a way for our society to live more sustainably, and more as one with the earth.
-- Julia & Nic, Co-Founders of Robin
P.S. We’re keen to ensure we’re continuously learning about all things food waste recycling so that we can try to figure out how we can best solve this problem for us all. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions on this topic, we’d love to hear from you, so please do get in touch.
