Think about your favorite recipe.

Let’s say it’s some kind of comfort food, like spaghetti with red sauce. Main ingredients: spaghetti and tomatoes, onions and olive oil for the sauce. So, we cut tomatoes and onions, the peel from them ends up in your trash.

However, they could come down to one separate waste area along with all other food waste, and this is a very large part of our garbage, and from there throw it into brown basket, specially designed containers for organic waste.

With this very simple but extremely important movement, you can automatically become a part of it. food waste management which has been talked about a lot in recent years. And for good reason: according to 2021 Food Waste Index Report, above 40% Waste in cities is organic, meaning food waste, skins from the fruits and vegetables we consume, coffee grounds, and much more that our kitchen “generates”. In fact, it is estimated that each of us annually “produces” 142 kg of food waste, number that puts Greece in top 3 countries with the largest amount of household food waste in the world.

Graphics: Pavlos Methodius

Therefore, it is important that this garbage gets into the appropriate processing unit through which it can be compost, in order to manage them in the most environmentally friendly way.

The process may seem simple, but it is possible that you were not sufficiently informed about all this, like many other citizens. That’s exactly what it does with action incommon, which promotes the circular economy through programs such as “Food Treasure” And “Close the food loop.”

As explained Cleo Christopoulou, program project manager Close the food cycle the first thing to understand is how easy it is to be part of this circle: since it’s waste that we throw in one of the other bins in our area anyway.

From the beginning of 2023, all municipalities must have brown trash cans in accordance with Law 4819/2021.

Everything, of course, starts with proper information. “Close the Food Cycle” in collaboration with Municipality of Papagos Cholargos (and hoping to extend its action to other municipalities) seeks, therefore, to raise awareness and then activate all participants in this cycle: that is, citizens, professionals, as well as workers in the cleaning sector.

In the municipality in question, there are brown trash cans here and there. two years, and from January 1, 2023, all municipalities are required to have ballot boxes of this color, based on Law 4819/2021.

Therefore, in order for citizens to be informed about “what we are doing with brown tanks”, InCommOn, in cooperation with the municipality of Papagos Cholargos, organizes meetings with them, as he recently did at the local park, to explain everything they need to know and answer any questions they might have.

And the project does not stop there: its “promo” continues from magnets And stickers placed in the right places in the kitchen, they remind every household what we are doing with… the new “food waste” we have just created.

The most obligatory object of the action, of course brown basket “mini me” which was distributed to the residents of the municipality to place on the kitchen table to make it even easier to collect “food waste” before it ends up in a large brown trash can.

As Cleo Christopoulou admits, citizens and workers are not only not well informed about the food waste cycle, but they often have a distorted view of some things. For example, Many people think that if they throw leftover food in the trash, it will smell bad. However, the project manager explains that, unlike the blue or green bins, the brown bins each time they are turned over in the garbage truck while disinfecting them so these are practically the cleanest tanks that we will meet on the street.

Since the correct update starts early, InCommOn starts the program at the same time. “Food Treasure” implement the concept of the circular economy and school community. So, starting with Papagos-Cholargos High School, young students in turn are being informed and begin to practice reducing food waste so as not to ask mom and dad “What is a brown basket?” or what to do with the banana peel from the banana they just ate.

However, not to go too far, sometimes the fight against food waste is right next to us. Remember what our grandmothers do: they take prepared coffee grounds and put them in pots as fertilizer.

Again, we can go even further. I’m already going through this Food Waste Action Week (which has been introduced since 2021), isn’t it time for each of us to start looking for a brown bin in our area?