Where does expired food and kitchen waste go? Restaurants, large supermarkets and hypermarkets will be brought under management and required to report
To prevent food from "going from the trash can back to the dining table," the Food and Drug Administration required restaurants to report waste oil in June, and the Environmental Protection Administration recently drafted an amendment to the announcement that will expand the list of regulated retail mass-merchandise businesses and supermarket food waste flows. "Kitchen waste that was previously exempt from reporting will all have to be reported in the future." Starting in December of this year, any company whose head office has capital of more than 25 million yuan must report online the generation, storage, clearance, treatment, reuse, export and import of kitchen waste, so that the clearance flow of kitchen waste can be tracked in real time.
According to preliminary statistics from the Environmental Protection Administration, the businesses currently moving from "'not reporting' into 'required to report'" include more than 800 supermarkets selling fresh and combination prepared foods, and more than 80 retail mass-merchandise stores.
In addition, restaurant kitchen waste will also be formally brought under regulation. A public hearing is expected to be held at the end of this month, an announcement is expected in early September, and after the end of this year, restaurant operators will all have to report their kitchen waste flows.
Expired food must be reported as kitchen waste to ensure it will not flow back into the market
What is kitchen waste? Su Kuo-tse, deputy director of the Environmental Protection Administration's Waste Management Division, explained, "Expired food discarded by supermarkets becomes kitchen waste and falls under the jurisdiction of the Waste Disposal Act.
And according to Article 28 of the Waste Disposal Act, businesses must handle kitchen waste themselves, or commission a public or private waste treatment organization approved by the competent authority to assist with clearance. "The reporting system is what ensures which clearance channel the kitchen waste flows into."
Su Kuo-tse said there are many ways to handle kitchen waste, "it may go through legal pig farms, biogas power generation, composting and other channels," and in order to prevent clearance and transport operators from having the opportunity to resell kitchen waste, GPS positioning systems have already been installed on more than 800 clearance vehicles, "as long as a vehicle's route is abnormal, or it stays too long at a certain point, the local environmental protection bureau can go and inspect," reducing the chance of kitchen waste flowing out.
In addition, local environmental protection bureaus will also be required to strengthen cross-checking inspections, "once it is found that the tonnage of waste reported by a business does not match the actual tonnage, the investigation of clearance and transport channels will be expanded."
The Environmental Protection Administration will work with local environmental protection bureaus to hold public hearings for businesses, and will provide a system operation manual to guide businesses in reporting online before December.
Environmental groups: kitchen waste should be analyzed in more detail and used effectively
Shen Pao-li, senior specialist at the Homemakers United Foundation Environmental Protection Fund, said, "The Environmental Protection Administration has finally started to act," but unfortunately it is not thorough enough.
Shen Pao-li explained, "The Kyoto Environmental Protection Bureau in Japan conducts garbage composition analysis for kitchen waste, classifying waste in detail according to unopened food, opened food, near-expiry items, expired kitchen waste and so on, and then further dividing it into 26 subcategories such as leafy vegetables and cooked kitchen waste, so that it can more effectively know how waste should be recycled and used."
Shen Pao-li said that if detailed garbage analysis can be carried out carefully, it will be possible to know which category of garbage has the highest proportion, and the government can propose reduction measures for that subcategory. She said, "source reduction management" is more important than "back-end waste reuse."
Su Kuo-tse said that at present the Environmental Inspection Corps only conducts garbage analysis for combustibles, non-combustibles, moisture, ash and combustible content, and kitchen waste composition has not yet been analyzed that finely. "At present we only have a rough grasp that kitchen waste accounts for 40% of total garbage," and there are future plans to dewater and reuse that 40% of kitchen waste to achieve a reduction effect.
As for whether to carry out such detailed kitchen waste composition analysis, Su Kuo-tse said it will need to be discussed further with the Environmental Inspection Corps, "we need to know what the point of doing it that finely is."