ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - Tons of food goes to waste each year in St. Louis.
"The St. Louis region waste 1.33 billion pounds of food each year," said Gillian Garland, Program Manager at the Green Dining Alliance in St Louis on Total Information A.M. "Unfortunately, 22% of that's comes from restaurants."
"I think part of it comes from restaurants not really knowing what to do, how to keep things safe, and we live in a place where we have to go and get these large hauls of groceries in order to keep up with our day-to day."
The Green Dining Alliance is trying to make people more aware and find create ways to change their food use habits.
"The Green Dining Alliance is a third-party certification system that certifies restaurants in the St. Louis-area," said Garland.
For the second straight year, the Green Dining Alliance hosted the St. Louis Food Waste Challenge. The alliance currently has 93 restaurants on their roster and six participated in this year's food waste challenge.
"So I went, and I helped dig through their trash, their compost, the less glamorous side of this work," said Garland. "I did what is called an audit. I'm about to get their post challenge audits next week."
Garland says there are many ways she and the Green Dining Alliance have helped restaurants reduce their waste.
"Other things could be looking at how they are storing their ingredients. Are they storing apples in the fridge to keep them fresh, are they storing tomatoes at room temperature to keep them from going mealy," said Garland. "There solutions are really easy and can help save the restaurant a lot of money."
Garland says about a quarter of restaurants in their program are composting, including the Panorama restaurant at the St. Louis Art Museum.
"We had a new restaurant Panorama at the St. Louis Art Museum that decided to start composting this year as a result of the challenge, which is very exciting to see," said Garland. "I'm always excited to see more of them get on board."
