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The surprisingly strong case for Mill.
Food waste is a climate disaster, responsible for twice as many greenhouse gases as the global aviation, shipping, and paper industries combined. The food system generates about a third of our emissions, and nearly a third of the food it produces never makes it to our stomachs, which means we waste nearly a third of the farmland, fuel, fertilizer, electricity, irrigation water, and deforestation that goes into producing our food. At the same time, the 40 million tons of uneaten food that Americans send to landfills every year can decompose into heat-trapping methane, which also isn’t great.
But maybe Harry can help.
Harry is a sleek white Wi-Fi-connected garbage bin in my family’s pantry, a “food dehydrator” that transforms our kitchen scraps into chicken feed. It was created by Mill, a San Francisco-area startup that has raised more than $100 million to try to keep more household waste inside the food system. Mill’s founders built the Nest thermostat that limits household energy waste, so they know something about using high-tech hardware to try to adjust consumer habits in climate-friendly ways. They’ve shipped thousands of bins since April, and they say they’ve got more demand than their Mexican factory can supply.
Every day, my family tosses banana peels, pizza crusts, eggshells, moldy salmon, wilted celery, and other leftovers into Harry. Every night, Harry spends about six hours heating, grinding and shrinking them into nutrient-rich feed that looks like a cross between coffee grounds and dirt. Food waste is about 80 percent water, and Harry dries it out; it takes almost two months before the bin gets full and I have to mail the grounds back to Mill.
It’s a seamless user experience, with no smell, no schlep, and so far, virtually no noise. The bin has a cool wood-veneer lid with a convenient foot pedal to lift it; Mill CEO Matt Rogers helped engineer the iPod and iPhone at Apple before he started Nest, so he knows something about good design, too. And the company has calculated that its bins will help the average household avoid about half a ton of emissions every year, not even including the deforestation that won’t be needed to grow the chicken feed Mill will replace.
Mill’s app prompts you to name your bin upon arrival, and we named ours after Mill president Harry Tannenbaum, an engaging climate wonk who charmed me with his frequent use of the word “putrescence.” (I initially wanted to name it Wastoid, but my wife informed me that was stupid.) Tannenbaum got the idea for Mill after learning that food waste is the largest component of U.S. landfills.
“That freaked me out,” Tannebaum said. “Not only are we disconnecting those nutrients from returning to the earth by entombing them in landfills, they’re creating methane that cooks the earth. And it’s all starting in our kitchens.”
Composting can keep food waste out of landfills, too, but only 4 percent of U.S. households compost, because separating and storing food scraps can be a time-consuming, odor-producing, rodent-attracting hassle. And unlike many composting programs, which have absurdly complex requirements about what can be used, Mill’s bins can recycle just about everything except big bones, liquids, and excessive sugar. But their real bonus for the planet is that while compost can be used to help grow food, Mill’s grounds are still basically food. This summer, the Food and Drug Administration and the Association of American Feed Control Officials cleared the way for their use as commercial poultry feed, a much higher use than compost on the EPA’s food recovery hierarchy. It’s the first step in getting those grounds into the hands of chicken farmers.
It’s nice that my family no longer has to take out our regular trash so often, now that we no longer dump food into it, and I get a kick out of leaving Harry like this at night:
and seeing this the next morning:
It’s real bio-recycling, and while Mill would only be able to feed 7 percent of U.S. chickens if every U.S. household had a bin, every soybean that Mill can replace is a soybean that doesn’t need to be grown in the Amazon. And Harry helps us notice what we’re not eating — Instacart, you’re sending us too many mushy grapes — so that we can buy less of it and avoid waste on the front end.
That said, Mill is letting me use Harry for free, because I’m a dork who writes about food and climate change. I might be less enthusiastic if I were paying the hefty normal-human rate of $33 a month for the privilege of using its bins. Some composting services cost almost that much, and Mill emphasizes that its bins can take the stink and ick out of the kitchen experience — no putrescence! — but realistically, they provide more benefits for the climate than for consumers, which will limit the universe of consumers willing to shell out $396 a year for them.
Tannenbaum says Mill makes more economic sense in communities with “pay-as-you-throw” garbage collection, because Mill customers can save money by stepping down to smaller trash cans; in a pilot program in Tacoma, Washington, those savings have often reduced Mill’s effective cost to $8 a month. Mill is also working on deals with apartment buildings to provide bins to all their residents, so they could have easier trash management and less disgusting trash rooms. And corporations looking to shrink their carbon footprints could shrink their janitorial costs as well by putting Mill bins in their cafeterias. Tannenbaum points out that at Nest, after early-adopting consumers proved that smart thermostats could reduce energy waste, utilities helped defray the costs of moving Nest into the mainstream.
But change is hard, especially behavioral change. And change is slow, which is a problem, because the U.S. has set a goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030. There’s no way Mill can scale up fast enough to make a serious difference without government help. And that’s true for all kinds of food waste solutions — behavioral approaches like Britain’s “Love Food Not Waste” marketing campaign; policy reforms like tax breaks for restaurants that donate leftovers; and technologies like invisible biotech peels that prevent fruit and vegetables from spoiling. Our species is not going to wake up one day and make a collective decision to stop wasting a billion tons of food every year. We’ll need shoves (and cash) to overcome our inertia.
In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced last week that it’s investing $25 million in avoiding food waste. That’s a nice gesture, enough to fund 60,000 Mill bins for a year. But it’s a pittance compared to the $23 billion that USDA is spending on “climate-smart agriculture” — mostly regenerative farming experiments that, to put it charitably, will have an uncertain effect on emissions — and especially compared to the $428 billion in the last five-year farm bill.
Until recently, climate policy was seen as energy policy. But the world is starting to understand that unless it dramatically slashes emissions from the food system — at least a 75 percent reduction by 2050 — it won’t meet its climate goals even if it stops using fossil fuels. Congress is now talking about a new farm bill, and history suggests its main thrust will be to keep shoveling big money to big farmers. But it’s also an opportunity to make real investments in scaling up climate-friendly agricultural innovations like drought-tolerant super-trees, meat and dairy substitutes, alternative fertilizers, and food waste recycling options like Harry. Our energy and climate problems aren’t getting better fast enough, but our food and climate problems are still getting worse, and we’re not going to fix them by doing the same things we’ve always done.
That’s just putrescence.
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Current conditions: Thousands are without power and drinking water in the French Indian Ocean territory of Réunion after Tropical Cyclone Garance made landfall with the strength of a Category 2 hurricane • A severe weather outbreak could bring tornadoes to southern states early next week • It’s 44 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Washington, D.C., where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet with President Trump today to sign a minerals deal.
The 16th United Nations Biodiversity Conference, known as COP16, ended this week with countries agreeing on a crucial roadmap for directing $200 billion a year by 2030 toward protecting nature and halting global biodiversity loss. Developed nations are urged to double down on their goal to mobilize $20 billion annually for conservation in developing countries this year, rising to $30 billion by 2030. The plan also calls for further study on the relationships between nature conservation and debt sustainability. “The compromise proved countries could still bridge their differences and work together for the sake of preserving the planet, despite a fracturing world order and the dramatic retreat of the United States from international green diplomacy and foreign aid under President Donald Trump,” wrote Louise Guillot at Politico. The decision was met with applause and tears from delegates. One EU delegate said they were relieved “about the positive signal that this sends to other ongoing negotiations on climate change and plastics that we have.”
The Trump administration yesterday fired hundreds of workers across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, key agencies responsible for monitoring the changing climate and communicating extreme weather threats. The National Hurricane Center and the Tsunami Warning Center both operate under NOAA, and the layoffs come ahead of the upcoming hurricane season. “People nationwide depend on NOAA for free, accurate forecasts, severe weather alerts, and emergency information,” said Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “Purging the government of scientists, experts, and career civil servants and slashing fundamental programs will cost lives.” A federal judge yesterday temporarily blocked the administration’s mass firings of federal workers, so the status of those affected in this latest round is unclear. Somewhat relatedly, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports that the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, was told by NOAA it had to rename a major conservation program as the “Gulf of America” or else lose federal funding.
The FBI reportedly has been questioning Environmental Protection Agency employees about $20 billion in climate and clean energy grants approved under the Biden administration, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has insisted were issued hastily and without oversight. According toThe Washington Post, the Justice Department has asked several U.S. attorneys to submit warrant requests or launch grand jury investigations, but those efforts have been rejected due to lack of evidence or “reasonable belief that a crime occurred.” “It’s certainly unusual for any case to involve two different U.S. attorney offices declining a case for lack of probable cause and to have the Department of Justice continue to shop it,” Stefan D. Cassella, a former federal prosecutor, told the Post. Several nonprofits said their Citibank accounts holding the funding have been frozen without explanation.
Some Democratic states are apparently freezing out Tesla in response to Elon Musk’s political maneuvers within the Trump administration. Tesla operates on a direct-to-consumer sales model, so it doesn’t have to go through dealerships. More than 25 states ban or restrict direct EV sales in some way. The company has been lobbying to get permission to sell directly in these states, but some Democratic lawmakers are “disgusted” by Musk’s moves in Washington and are rebuffing lobbyists or dropping their support for proposed legislation allowing direct sales.
Apple is in trouble for claiming some of its Apple Watches are “carbon neutral.” A group of customers are suing the company after learning its claims relied on carbon offsetting projects in protected national parks or heavily forested areas, instead of “genuine” carbon reductions. “The carbon reductions would have occurred regardless of Apple’s involvement or the projects’ existence,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. “Because Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are predicated on the efficacy and legitimacy of these projects, Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are false and misleading.” The lawsuit seeks damages, as well as an injunction that prevents Apple from using the carbon neutral claim to market its watches. Apple has a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Researchers in Amsterdam have examined the nests of birds known as common coots and discovered plastic items dating back to the 1990s, including a McDonald’s McChicken wrapper from 1996, and a Mars wrapper promoting the 1994 USA FIFA World Cup. “History is not only written by humans,” said Auke-Florian Hiemstra, who led the research. “Nature, too, is keeping score.”
Auke-Florian Hiemstra
Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.