Food waste and circular economies – The Ecologist, October 11 2018

The idea that one man’s trash is another’s treasure has been thrown around for decades, but could taking it literally help to tackle food waste?

Approximately 88 million tonnes of food are wasted in the EU annually and the consequences seep far beyond homes, businesses and landfill sites.

Along with associated economic losses, and the ethical matter of disposing food in a world where eleven percent of the population are undernourished, wasting food amounts to a huge squandering of natural resources.

Through committing to UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, the EU endeavours to halve food waste at consumer and retail level by 2030 and reduce food losses along production and supply chains. The establishment of the EU Platform on Food Losses and Food Waste bolstered this goal, but novel approaches are needed to support a growing population .

Avoidable waste

This circular economy model aims to reduce waste streams by reusing waste as a resource elsewhere.

The EU aims to transition towards this in many areas and in their Action Plan for the Circular Economy, it’s potential for food waste mitigation is recognised.

The circular economy model can apply to food waste but it’s not a one-size fits all solution. Determining the type of food waste involved is key to deciding the most appropriate way to deal with it according to Eoin White, a Research Development Specialist with AgroCycle – a Horizon 2020 funded project addressing agri-food waste.

White explained: “Residue is used to define unavoidable waste, such as fruit skins. They’re a natural part of producing food. The other is wasted food and that’s very much leftovers; things that should and can be eaten but due to consumer behaviour, poor storage and management practices, end up becoming waste.”

While unavoidable food waste can have high value secondary uses, the focus for tackling avoidable waste should first be on prevention: “If the goal is just to utilise this wasted food elsewhere, there’s no incentive to reduce it.”

Loop logic

Hilke Bos-Brouwers, senior Scientist Sustainable Food Chains at Wageningen University and Research, said: “Once this distinction is made, it’s important to seek out the best possible new destination for a waste stream.”

Bos-Brouwers, a scientific coordinator for the FUSIONS (Food Use for Social Innovation by Optimising waste prevention Strategies) and REFRESH projects, said: “With unavoidable food waste, we must valorise it with the highest value possible. You can interpret value on many levels but it basically involves keeping it as close to food as you can.”

If not fit for human consumption, high value applications could include animal feed, biomaterials, and ingredients. While recognising the potential to convert food waste to bioenergy and compost, Bos-Brouwers says it shouldn’t be the first resort.

Prioritising high value applications forms the basis of the cascading principle ̶ an idea that prioritises material uses for biomass before energy uses to prevent raw materials being lost.

White explained: “You could take potato peel, burn it and get a little bit of energy. Technically that’s recycling. But there’s a lot of value in that potato peel. You should try to take as much as you can from it and when everything is taken out, then you can burn or compost it.”

Integrated approach

The circular economy model aims to mitigate waste by creating closed loop systems, but how wide that loop is drawn varies. Internal loops may be preferable as they can ensure resources are conserved with given product lifecycles.

Food waste occurs at production, retail and consumer levels and the circular economy approach can be integrated at all stages.

For example, AgroCycle is partnered with Fraunhofer in Germany, IPCF-CNR Institute in Italy, and Demeter in Greece to help develop innovative products such as straws and cups using potato pulp and rice bran fibres from the agri-food industry, notes White.

Bos-Brouwers noted that innovations also happen where supply chain partners meet up. Her Wageningen UR team provided the example of a retail franchiser and a catering expert who recognised the potential to work together and were supported with knowledge on supply chains, logistics, legislative issues and business models. They founded a company that repurposes retail and food processors surplus into marketable products. Based in the Netherlands, this successful initiative is now known as De Verspillingsfabriek.

Households generate over half of the EU’s food waste and while its inconsistent nature make it difficult to find high value applications, apps such as OLIO allow consumers to share their unwanted food.

Instilling confidence

The recently revised EU Waste Framework Directive now includes a definition for food waste but a level of ambiguity still remains.

Bos-Brouwers said: “In the definition, when something becomes waste, it’s with the intention or the action to discard. Yet, if some entrepreneurs want to collaborate using the sideflow of one company as a resource of the other, they could run into permit problems trying to transport the sideflow as they’re not a waste management company.”

Instilling trust in new approaches to food waste can also be challenging. White added: “I don’t think you get the multiplier effect if it’s only enforced. It’s important to find the right nudges or confidence levels with the [large groups involved] to get them on board.”

“The research community plays a vital role, not by making this more complex, but by investigating what can be done with a fresh look.”

Introducing standards for material passports would help to instil trust within producers and consumers, who may be uncertain how a material created from biomaterials compares to its traditional counterpart.

Shared responsibility

While finding new destinations for unavoidable food waste is celebrated, food waste prevention when possible is preferable.

A study conducted by Oldfield and colleagues at University College Dublin found that food waste minimisation results in the greatest reduction of global warming, acidification and eutrophication potential when compared with other food waste management approaches.

Lisa Ruetgers, who is currently doing a PhD in food waste and market solutions in Coventry University argued that “everybody is responsible food waste reduction.”

Checking the fridge before shopping, sharing or freezing leftovers and purchasing imperfect produce can help at consumer level, while retailers can offer imperfect items, avoid overstocking shelves and inform consumers of best storage practices. Legislation is also very important.

Ruetgers added: “All approaches are needed and need to be aligned, ideally top-down as well as bottom-up. I don’t think you can blame just one part or solve the problem by just one approach.”

(First published by theeoclogist.org on October 11 2018. Available online at: https://theecologist.org/2018/oct/11/food-waste-and-circular-economies)

Ireland’s battle to save our wildlife – Irish Examiner, September 3 2018

Amy Lewis highlights the measures taken in tackling crimes against Ireland’s wildlife and the need for more action.

Protecting the voiceless victims of wildlife crime is a constant battle.

The ongoing persecution of wildlife overseas is often highlighted but such incidences aren’t as far away from home as one might imagine. In fact, the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and Gardaí face them each week.

In July, two men were charged before Portlaoise District Court for the trapping of protected wild goldfinches using bait and rat glue.

Meanwhile, an investigation is underway in Louth regarding the unlawful killing of two peregrine falcons nesting in the Cooley Mountains.

However, these and other known cases are only the tip of the iceberg.

“Many cases go undiscovered because by their nature, they’re suspicious and secretive activities,” says Dr Barry O’ Donoghue from the NPWS Agri-Ecology Unit.

The stakes are being raised to combat wildlife criminals and their increasingly sophisticated methods.

An Garda Síochána recently announced plans for a wildlife crime training course. Commencing in September, it will equip specially-appointed inspectors from each Garda division with tools to recognise and deal with wildlife crime.

Each inspector will work closely with their opposite number in the NPWS.

“Information is key. We want to show [inspectors] what the main offences are and demonstrate how to deal with them and prosecute them in the District Court,” says Kildare Superintendent Martin Walker, who previously led the Garda’s anti-poaching investigation Operation Bambi alongside the NPWS.

Although the Wildlife Act is the principal legislation regarding wildlife crime, Supt Walker says prosecution powers within it are limited.

Through training, he hopes to encourage Gardaí to ‘think laterally’ about other legislation that relates to these cases.

A surreptitious nature is a common denominator among wildlife crimes but offences take many forms.

According to Supt Walker, the illegal hunting of deer at night using lamps or lurchers is common.

Indeed, the Irish Deer Commission recently reported a significant increase in deer poaching and badger baiting in the Midlands.

“That’s particularly cruel. These animals release stress hormones and the meat isn’t even fit for human consumption. It’s just an absolute bloodlust,” says Supt Walker.

Catching finches is widespread, as is hare poaching with hounds.

“People are hunting hares across farmer’s land. They’ve no authority to be there, farmers are afraid and sometimes their livestock is getting injured,” says Supt Walker, who says that poachers often use hunts as intelligence-gathering operations for farm theft.

Birds of prey are also regular targets. The RAPTOR (Recording and Addressing Persecution and Threats to Our Raptors) protocol is a collaborative approach between the NPWS, Regional Veterinary Laboratories and the State Laboratory to determine non-habitat related threats to birds of prey.

“We needed a mechanism of investigating and recording incidents, as well as using that data to inform and provide intelligence for addressing these issues,” says O’ Donoghue, who is a Project Investigator for RAPTOR.

The sixth and most recently published report showed that in 2016, there were 19 poisonings, six shootings and one incident involving a vehicle collision.

Common buzzards, red kites and peregrine falcons were the most highly-recorded victims.

Niall Hatch of Birdwatch Ireland notes that peregrines are common targets.

While he says some crimes have been at the hand of pigeon-fanciers, he stresses that most people involved in this hobby wouldn’t harm peregrines in any way.

Project Manager of the White-tailed Sea Eagle Reintroduction Project Dr Allan Mee adds that peregrine chicks are sometimes taken from the wild by those without a licence.

“Buzzards are [also] being targeted because some see them as a threat to pheasants being released. Buzzards aren’t well-regarded by some gun clubs in parts of the country,” continues Mee, stressing that generally, his team have a good relationship with gun clubs.

“Buzzards were almost extinct in Ireland but now have spread across the country. There’s no earthly reason for anyone to persecute them,” adds Hatch.

People are sometimes worried that they’re a threat to lambs but they couldn’t kill a lamb in a million years. They’re nothing but a benefit to a farm as they kill rats and rabbits.

The RAPTOR report notes that some poisoning incidents, particularly those involving buzzards, red kites and barn owls are the result of bio-accumulation i.e. birds ingesting rodents that have been poisoned with rodenticides.

These cases are considered secondary and unintentional.

Through spreading awareness, Mee has seen that this can be mitigated.

Of 14 confirmed poisoning cases of white-tailed sea eagles, since their reintroduction from Norway commenced in 2007, Mee says not one has taken place since 2015.

He credits this to awareness, education and working with landowners.

“In the past when they were poisoned, it was largely because people weren’t aware that the birds were out there or of a change in their population.”

Some other poisoning incidents are more sinister, such the illegal placing of poisoned meat baits.

According to O’ Donoghue, some have been laced with enough poison to kill a human if touched and accidentally ingested.

To tackle these crimes, it’s universally agreed that more education and public awareness is key.

“We must engage with local communities so that they have someone they know and trust they can report something to,” says O’ Donoghue.

The 2013 and 2015 Wildlife Crime Conferences organised by Wildlife Rehabilitation Ireland have helped to spread awareness.

The organisation, who run the information website Wildlifecrime.ie, will hold a public Wildlife Rehabilitation Conference in Slane this October which includes talks on wildlife crime.

Additionally, Hatch says that more resources could help.

“The NPWS needs to be much better resourced. They’re doing great work but are struggling because they don’t have the resources they need and deserve.”

Supt Walker hopes that with the upcoming training, potential plans for a wildlife crime recording system and liaising with various stakeholders, wildlife crime nationwide will be minimised.

This can be aided with the cooperation of the public.

If aware of a suspected wildlife crime, they should report it to the Gardaí and local NPWS ranger.

Supt Walker stresses that anyone who reports will have their anonymity fully respected.

(First published by the Irish Examiner on September 3 2018. Available online at: https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/lifestyle/features/irelands-battle-to-save-our-wildlife-866228.html)

‘They took our baby girl away in a black holdall. Forty years later, I got to walk her down the aisle’- Irish Daily Mail, February 28 2015

In September 2014, Eamonn Burke lay in a cluster of hospital trolleys. The 63-year-old from Arklow was undergoing what he hoped would be his final check-up following the liver transplant that saved his life in August 2006. Amid the chatter and coughs of other patients, the doctor asked him whether he had any children.

‘I told her I had five sons and one daughter,’ says Eamonn, smiling. ‘That’s the first time I could say it.’

The reason this was such a momentous occasion for Eamonn was that, just a week prior to the check-up, he and his wife Mary had met with their 44-year-old daughter Mary for the first time. That meeting put an end to decades of secrecy and uncertainty regarding their eldest child, whom they had been forced to put up for adoption in 1970.

‘We couldn’t find out where she was gone,’ says Eamonn. ‘We didn’t know if she was dead or anything. We knew nothing.’

In fact, Mary had grown up with her adoptive parents PJ and Kathleen McGovern in what she described as a ‘loving family home’ in Cabinteely. She said that she has always known that she was adopted and had been encouraged by the McGoverns to find her birth parents. In recent years, she decided that she was ready to start her search.

‘Life was good and I was in the right frame of mind and the right place,’ she says. ‘I got nowhere at first but then I kicked it off again a couple of years ago.’

Although Mary put her name on the National Adoption Contact Preference Register (NACPR) when it was established in 2005, she was not matched with her parents as they themselves had not registered. Eamonn explained that he and his wife had been prevented from searching for their daughter since they reluctantly put her up for adoption.

‘We would have looked for the first couple of years but they bit your head off for that,’ he says. ‘We were told that we couldn’t contact her, that we’d no right to talk to her’

Mary Snr says that they were always hoping their daughter would get in touch. She gave birth to her daughter — whom she christened Elizabeth May — in her house in her hometown of Arklow. Like many unmarried mothers in Ireland at the time, she faced stigma for giving birth to a child outside of marriage and was forced to put her child up for adoption. Some 44 years on, she can vividly recall the night that her first child was taken from her by a local nurse as Eamonn sat outside on the wall.

‘The nurse warned me I wasn’t to tell anybody, not even my best friend. Mary was put into a black holdall bag and taken away and that was it,’ says the 63-year-old. ‘I didn’t even see her but my sister would have held her.’

Eamonn was unaware that his daughter had been taken until three hours later. Although he had seen the nurse leave with the bag, he was unaware what was in it.

‘They said she was gone, that they took her away,’ he explains. ‘The nurse had put her on the floor of the car, shut the door and drove off.’

The couple were then required to go to the Pro-Cathedral to give written permission to have their daughter put up for adoption.

‘We weren’t even let into the Pro-Cathedral, we had to sign the papers on the steps of it,’ they explain.

The couple, who met in school when they were teenagers, were married two years after Mary was born and went on to have five sons. Their daughter had always believed that she had been given up for adoption for ‘a good reason’ and so, was not deterred from finding her parents when she was not matched by the NACPR.

At the end of 2010, Mary discovered that her adoption records, previously held by the Rotunda, were now under the care of the HSE. In June 2011, she applied for a meeting with a social worker but, due to a staff shortage, did not get her first appointment until December 2013. It was then that she met social worker Helena, who Mary and her parents describe as ‘brilliant’.

‘During my first appointment with her, all she told me was that my birth mother’s name was Mary, she was 17 when she had me, she worked in a library and it was in Wicklow,’ recalls Mary. ‘That’s all I knew.’

She also discovered that, coincidentally, her adoptive parents had given her the same name as her birth mother, Mary Catherine.

She received no more information for several months and by that stage, certain that nothing more would come of her search, she was delighted to receive a phone call from Helena with the news that she had tracked down her birth parents.

‘Helena wrote to an old neighbour of mine looking for me,’ explains Mary Snr. ‘He handed it into my sister Rose because my mother’s name was on it. We rang up the HSE but we didn’t get any answer. Soon after, Helena sent a letter to us.’

After receiving the letter, the couple rang the HSE worker and arranged an appointment with her. ‘Helena knew all about our daughter, it was just something else. We couldn’t believe it!’ says Mary Snr.

They were eager to be reunited with their daughter whom they ‘always hoped’ to meet. However, before a reunion could be organised, Mary had to write a letter to her birth parents through the social worker. Eamonn and Mary Snr received the letter while visitors were staying and admit they ‘thought they’d never go!’.

In addition to the letter, the envelope contained photographs of Mary and her two children Dawn, 17, and Luke, 12. ‘We burst it open and looked at it and of course the two of us started crying,’ recalls Mary Snr.

The trio arranged to meet for the first time on September 3 in the offices of the HSE in Dublin. Eamonn and Mary Snr say that they weren’t the slightest bit nervous about meeting their daughter. ‘We couldn’t wait,’ says Eamonn, describing how they arrived half an hour early for their appointment.

‘We just cried at first,’ laughs Eamonn, as he recalls the moment he met his daughter.

‘I still cry, so does he,’ adds his wife.

Following the meeting, which lasted for over two hours, they were joined by Mary’s partner Mark Wood for lunch in Brady’s of Shankill, a moment which Mary Snr describes as ‘lovely’.

As a result of her determination and the help of Helena, Mary discovered that she had not only a set of birth parents, but five brothers and 12 nieces and nephews as well.

‘One more nephew arrived a few months ago,’ she smiles. ‘My godchild!’

David, Mary’s second eldest brother, was the first of his siblings to find out about his sister. Eamonn and Mary had hoped to tell their sons about the news together but, as one of their sons Jonathan lives in England, they planned to wait until he could come home. However, despite their best efforts to keep him from finding out, David accidentally met his sister when he insisted on visiting his father in A&E following the discovery of a clot on his liver.

 ‘She was there holding his hand and they said this is your sister,’ explains the 40-year-old. ‘I looked at her and said, “you may explain this all to me”.’

David said he felt ‘honoured’ to be given the task of telling his brothers Eamonn, Clive, Darragh and Jonathan about Mary, However, as he had to wait until Jonathan flew home four days later, he found it very difficult not to ‘let it slip’.

He describes the moment that he told them the news. ‘I sat them down and told them the story, bringing them back to the Seventies. They were stuck for words at first. I asked them then if they wanted to see their sister and they all said yes. I could see my parent’s car outside and I said, “give me two seconds…”’

The night that David brought Mary into the room to meet her brothers was an ‘emotional’ one with plenty of ‘tears, pictures and champagne’.

Yet, although David now feels that he has ‘known Mary a lifetime’, he is angry about how his parents were treated, describing it as ‘shocking’ and ‘degrading’.

‘I can’t imagine the pain and suffering they went through,’ he adds.

The family are now making up for the time that they lost with Mary. According to David, his father, who he described as a shy man, is never off the phone to her. ‘He’s a changed man,’ he says.

For David and his brothers, the biggest loss is not having memories with their sister. ‘I’ve lost 40 years of Mary but I’m going to make up for it now,’ he says.

Mary and her natural parents feel that sharing their story might help the many other people in Ireland who are going through the same process.

According to figures from the Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI), there have been more than 11,600 applications to join the NACPR since it was set up in 2005. The Register is a voluntary database that allows birth relatives and people who were adopted to express their choice for contact with a blood relative. Since its establishment, the NACPR has matched 753 adopted people with their natural parents.

According to Dr. Fergus Ryan, law lecturer at Maynooth University and an expert in family law, the success of the register is ‘modest’ despite the ‘best efforts of the volunteers’ that run the register.

‘The National Contact Registry is useful but it depends very much on both sides,’ he says, referring to the fact that both parties have to put their names on the register in order for a match to be made.

For her part, Mary advises anybody in a similar situation to her to ‘keep persevering’ despite the many blocks in place.

According to Eamonn, finding Mary has completely turned their lives around and the whole experience has been positive. Since September, she has spent many weekends in Arklow with her parents or at matches with her brothers. Soon after they met, she introduced Eamonn and Mary to her adoptive mother Kathleen as well as her children. Unfortunately, Mary’s father P.J. passed away in 2002. According to Mary, both families get on extremely well.

‘I think Mam is delighted. She thinks they are lovely so she knows I’m in good hands,’ she laughs. ‘Mark is up and down to the boys and out with them and having a few drinks. He has great fun with them.’

David echoes their positive sentiments, describing it as a story with a bad start but a fairytale ending. And indeed, to give this fairytale its love story, on Christmas morning, Mary’s partner Mark Wood proposed.

‘I was thrilled,’ she says. ‘I already have everything organised, including the dress.’

The big day will take place in October in the Glenview Hotel in Wicklow. Mary is looking forward to spending the day with both of her families and, of course, the moment that her father walks his only daughter down the aisle.