Turning food waste into something productive

The documentary, “We feed the world,” already showed the tremendous amount of food that is being wasted worldwide every day. The global weight of food waste is estimated at 1.6 billion tons of "primary product equivalents." Total food waste for the edible part of this weight amounts to 1.3 billion tons, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. This uneaten food needed 1.4 billion hectares of land, so 28 percent of the world's agricultural area, to grow annually. In the United States of America 40 percent of food is annually wasted, which represents 162 billion dollars. 

 WISErg, a Redmond, Washington based startup, wants to address this problem by making something useful out of all this wasted food. They created a machine that “eats” the produce from different stores in order to convert it into an organic fertilizer. The principal is simple; the machine goes to the different grocery stores where it transforms the leftover food into a nutrient-rich liquid, as explained by Munchies. Afterwards, it is transported to the start-up’s headquarters, where the liquid is processed into organic fertilizer. WISErg serves countless farms from Canada to Mexico to deliver their organic fertilizer.

The results of this new company are impressive especially considering that the founders come from Microsoft and therefore didn’t have an agricultural background.