Based on the EPA’s last Wasted Food Report (which, sadly, hasn’t been updated since 2019), residential food waste equaled 25 million tons, with only 3% of that waste being composted. The rest was sent to landfills.
The amount of plastic ending up in landfills was even worse, with the EPA estimating 27 million tons in 2018 alone, with a scant .001% being recycled.
Obviously, American families have a waste problem. But the big question is, what can individuals do to make an impact on numbers that are seemingly inexorable?
Granted, I’m biased, but I feel like throwing technology at it is the best solution. Especially if that tech can not just provide a solution but change how you approach a fundamental portion of your life. That’s why Clear Drop caught my eye with their Organics and Soft Plastic Collector devices. They tackle two different waste streams coming out of your home with an eye on reducing or eliminating them.
Garbage In Doesn’t Mean Garbage Out
Eliminating food waste is a complex problem. It accounts for an exceedingly large amount of volume in residential trash. It can also generate all kinds of nasty odors, which leads to frequent changing of trash bags, which leads to even more plastic in landfills. There are a lot of companies offering countertop food recyclers that turn your food waste into “food grounds” that are less volatile (because they’ve had the moisture baked out of them) and take up less volume (because they’ve been broken down).
The recommendations for these food grounds range from composting to using directly in planting to shipping back to the company for upcycling into livestock feed (like Mill).
But there are plenty that argue the amount of energy these devices use to break down and stabilize food waste offset their benefits. Indeed, my Mill recycler can pull as much as 3kwh during a particularly long daily run. They also aren’t producing compost — that takes time that technology just can’t replicate by baking your scraps for a few hours.
The most eco-friendly solution, then, is to get a compost bin (or something to attach to your trash can, like Simplehuman’s Compost Caddy) and dump food scraps in there, then either add them to your own compost pile or take them to a community compost collection site. But there are issues there too, mostly of the “what is that smell?” variety.
Clear Drop’s Organics Collector (OC) takes the odor-laden inconvenience out of composting by stabilizing (but not breaking down) your food waste to add to your compost. It does this by reducing the moisture in your food waste by 30-40%. It fits on your countertop (or on the floor with the included legs), has an auto-open lid to make dumping in food easy to do, and dries out the scraps without heat to control odor. Clear Drop estimates that, running 24/7, the OC only uses about 5.3kwH for an entire month.
The result is less-frequent dumping of the bin with minimal energy impact. Clear Drop says it can keep up to a week’s worth of scraps relatively odor-free thanks to its active charcoal fiter. Your mileage may vary depending on what you’re composting. That old wheel of camembert is going to tax the system more than a few slices of stale bread. At the end of the day though, dry, odor-free food waste is much easier to handle than a bin of actively rotting scraps. And the bin pops out of the unit easily so that you can transport the prepared scraps to their final destination.
And you are going to have to have a solution for your scraps at the end of the week. Clear Drop positions the OC as a “waste-preparation solution” rather than a compost machine. Whether it be personal use, municipal pickup, or community donation, the company is pushing its users to be part of the most sustainable solution for residential food waste.
Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work For All Plastic
It’s become apparent in recent years that plastic recycling is problematic. It’s energy inefficient and might even generate microplastics that end up in the environment. Then there’s the more personal problem that municipal recycling often doesn’t collect the plastics that we most frequently throw away: the soft plastics that carry our groceries, seal our food packaging, and more.
Most soft plastic ends up in the landfill (around 3lbs per household per month) even though it could be run through a post-consumer process to prepare it for use in new products. But collecting that soft plastic waste isn’t convenient and if you don’t have a local processor, finding someone to take your collected trash is difficult to impossible.
Enter Clear Drop’s Soft Plastics Collector (SPC). It’s a rather simple machine that gives you a convenient place to feed all your soft plastic waste. You unlock the SPC via its LCD screen and feed plastic into the slot at the top. On the average day, that’s it. The rollers flatten the plastic as it’s fed into the SPC (if this is bubble wrap, this’ll be rather noisy), the machine occasionally compacts the collected plastic so that there’s more room.
The SPC keeps track of how full its getting (though it doesn’t update this readout nearly enough so you might end up going over). Once it’s full, it prompts you to run a heating cycle to turn the collected plastic into a fused block that can then be shipped to Clear Drop’s plastic partner where it’s sorted, shredded, and turned into raw material for manufacturing new recycled plastic products.
While the SPC can be noisy when compacting and some have reported that the plastic-forming process releases noxious odors, living with the SPC is a simple mind shift. You’re still “disposing” of your soft plastics but instead of tossing them in with your other trash so that they can end up occupying landfill space forever, you feed them into the machine to eventually mail them away so that they can ultimately be upcycled. As far as meaningful changes go, it’s one you can do without having to change practically anything you already do.
Cost Benefits May Vary
Both of Clear Drop’s come with a hefty price tag. The Organics Collector starts at $450 (though you can find it on sale right now). The Soft Plastics Collector is $799, broken down over two years at $49 a month. For the SPC, that does include the cost of shipping your plastic off to be processed.
Whether or not that’s worth it to you is dependent on a lot of factors. Using Clear Drop’s solutions, you’ll generate less trash overall, which means there’ll be less at the curb to pick up. If you have to pay for “green bin” processing of food waste, you might be able to eliminate that altogether.
Cost isn’t the only factor, however. Making an impact by making less of a personal impact is key to deciding to adopt one or both of the Clear Drop devices. Indeed, cost is a minor part of a matrix of benefits that come with reducing your waste output.
Clear Drop’s mission to help you achieve a “zero-trash lifestyle” is an admirable one. And even just thinking about how to treat your trash differently is an important first step. Realizing that you can do more with what you’ve just been chucking into the garbage opens the door to making a greater impact.
