Matt Homewood: Shining light on food "Waste" through dumpster diving (ep295)
Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne is a podcast exploring our paths to holistic healing, ecological regeneration, and true abundance and wellness for all. Subscribe to our show in any podcast app!
Matt Homewood joins us in this episode to discuss:
the scale of supermarket food waste;
how certain economic incentives could go a long way toward solving this problem;
what he’s discovered as an urban harvester;
and more.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Raye Zaragoza (IG: @rayezaragoza, Spotify: Raye Zaragoza)
“I realized that basically if you fix food waste, or at least if you fix a big chunk of it, you could solve many, many of the social and environmental issues we face today.”
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Here’s Matt on how businesses could use discarded food to restore the land:
“In Danish law, businesses actually have to separate their organic waste compared to their other fractions – so plastic or carboard. But at the moment, they’re just dumping it all in one dumpster and it’s going to the incineration plant – which is better than landfill of course because you’re recovering about 10% of the total energy that’s been put in – but it’s only 10%.
And as you said, we could be converting that into fertilizer.
And that’s how we’re going to get [the supermarkets] I think – it’s by basically saying: Hold on, why are all the citizens in Denmark separating their trash into 10 different fractions whilst you businesses are just dumping it all? Surely there’s a double standard here.
Businesses have to separate this mass food waste so that we can return all these nutrients back to the land.”
About Matt Homewood:
Matt Homewood (Instagram: @anurbanharvester, LinkedIn: Matt Homewood) is a food waste campaigner who is on a mission to put an end to supermarket food waste in Denmark and beyond. By disrupting the prevailing supermarket business model, he hopes that society can re-envision a more ethical and sustainable food system, one that results in a wilder planet for all.
Make sure to check out Matt’s new website to learn more about him and stay up to date on his work!
