Too Good To Go

Green Apps Helping You Live an Eco-friendly Life

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Day 344 – I tried writing this post a few times and ending up changing topics, because I couldn’t find a good number of helpful environmentally friendly apps. So, when I saw the post by Earth911, 10 Green Apps To Help You Live More Sustainably, I knew that this would be a good time to share the information. With a new year closely approaching, these apps can help your resolutions to being more eco-friendly, become a reality.

Here are five from the list:

  1. iRecycle – iRecycle is Earth911.com in your pocket, the premiere application for finding local convenient recycling opportunities when you are on the go or at home. iRecycle provides access to more than 1,600,000 ways to recycle over 350 materials in the United States. Our daily sustainable living articles, podcasts, and recycling how-to guides are available any time you need information.
  2. Too Good to Go – Join millions of food waste warriors by downloading Too Good To Go – the world’s number 1 app for fighting food waste. Pick up delicious meals and ingredients from local stores. Each year, 40% all edible food in the US is thrown away. At Too Good To Go we want to put an end to food waste by creating a world where food produced is food consumed.
  3. GreenChoice – We rate food products and curate the best options for you & the planet.
  4. ShareWaste – We connect people who wish to recycle their food scraps and other organics with their neighbors who are already composting, worm-farming or keep farm animals. Now you can divert organic material from landfill while getting to know the people around you!
  5. PaperKarma – PaperKarma provides the largest directory in the US for opting out of junk mail, including: Catalogs, Charity Donation Requests, Credit Card & Insurance Offers, Direct Marketers, Local Mailers, National Mailers, and Previous Resident /Occupants’ Junk Mail.

Making a positive impact on the planet is just an app away.

Tomorrow, plastic roads.

Facts About Food Waste

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Day 262 – Back on Day 216, I wrote about the app, Too Good To Go. The app connects people with perfectly good food that bakeries, restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses are trying to sell before being tossed in the trash. The food is offered at a reduced price, giving consumers a great opportunity to rescue food at a discount.

Well, that same app is also a great source of information. The Food Waste Knowledge Hub offers a great deal of information about food waste.

They cover various questions about food waste:

  1. What is food waste?
  2. Where is food wasted?
  3. Why is food wasted?
  4. What food is wasted?
  5. Why is food waste a problem?
  6. Where does food waste go in the end?

By being informed you will discover important information about why food waste needs to be a priority for everyone.

  1. Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted, approximately 1.6 billion tons.
  2. That means within a year, we waste around 51 tons every second.
  3. Up to 40% of all food produced in the US is currently wasted and 83% of this is either wasted in food services such as restaurants and hotels, or at home. Currently, a whopping 63 million tons of food is not recycled or recovered, but instead heads to landfill, is incinerated, or remains unharvested.
  4. Food waste occurs at all stages from farm to fork.
  5. The most wasted type of food is fruit and vegetables. Almost half of all fruits, vegetables, roots and tubers are wasted along the supply chain, while one third of all fish and seafood never make it to our plate.
  6. Up to two-fifths of all fruit and vegetable crops are wasted because they are ‘ugly’.
  7. Our food system, and with it food waste, is the number one contributing factor that drives this threatening change in nature through land use change, pollution, and climate change.
  8. More than 70 billion tons of Green House Gases could be prevented from being released into the atmosphere, if we cut down on food waste.
  9. Together, the world’s top five meat and dairy corporations are now responsible for more annual GHG  emissions than Exxon, Shell or BP.
  10. Currently, in the U.S, a whooping 63 million tons of food is not recycled or recovered, but instead heads to landfill, is incinerated, or remains unharvested.

In order to understand the problem, you need to have the information. Spend a little time educating yourself. Most people don’t understand that food waste is a global issue that has a serious impact on our planet and our overall well-being.

What are you doing to fight the war against food waste?

Tomorrow, sustainable plastic products.

An App Rescuing Food from the Landfill

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Day 216 – The Too Good To Go app is really making a difference on the fight against food waste. To date, they have saved 85 million meals from being tossed in the trash. The concept is very easy and brilliant!

Here’s how it works:

  1. Restaurants, supermarkets, cafes, bakeries (and much more) will, at the end of the day, see how much extra food they have left over.
  2. They will put an add on the Too Good To Go app to notify customers about the reduced priced food.
  3. With the Google Maps function implemented in the app, customers can easily locate restaurants and stores that sell the food.
  4. All the food is discounted, which helps provide people with an inexpensive meal, and it helps restaurants sell all their food.
  5. The planet will be happy as this is a very sustainable way of pushing “leftovers” to consumers and keeping food out of the landfill.

Too Good To Go hopes that the more people that use the app, the more food gets consumed instead of ending up in a landfill. On average, each meal you rescue from going to the trash is equivalent to the carbon footprint from charging your smartphone 422 times.

Lastly, Too Good To Go is a Certified B-Corporation and they’re active in Chicago (and many more towns and cities across the country)!

Tomorrow, celebrating National Underwear Day.