 Aloha and welcome to another episode of Hawaii Food and Farmers Series. I'm your co-host Matt Johnson today here with Justine Espiritu. As always, we're here every Thursday at four o'clock except we are going to have some changes that we'll be talking about later. As always, we're talking to Hawaii's farmers, foodies, and those that are trying to make Hawaii's local food system just a little bit better. As always, you can join the conversation by tweeting in at atthinktechhi and you can also call in by calling the number shown below at the bottom of the screen 415-871-2474. Justine, who do we have on the show today? So today we have Jennifer Milhoen, who is the president of Styrophobia. And like we always do, we bring in interesting guests from different organizations and kind of looking at the food system from different perspectives. Jennifer has been looking at food waste in Hawaii and kind of looking at creative ways we can address it as well as partnering with the food and farm industry to create some products that could potentially be revenue generating and again trying to close the loop on resources and amenities. So Jennifer is here joining us as well as James McKay. Thank you, James. He will be stepping in as Hawaii Food and Farmers host the next three weeks to kind of mix things up and add a different perspective of the folks we're kind of talking to. So thanks, James, for joining us for this intern position day. But so to kind of start back to Jennifer, why don't you start us off with what kind of stirred your interest in food waste and how the kind of connections you've made to address this issue with farmers and what you've been working on. Okay. Well, I can start out by talking about the general mission of Styrophobia is kind of two-pronged. One is that as the name says, looking to get rid of single-use plastics, including Styrofoam. The other mission is working on getting statewide composting. And that's not intended to look like one specific picture. The idea is being that we try multiple models to see what works best, large-scale, small-scale. And one of the main reasons we want to focus on that is because when we talk about composting in Hawaii, a lot of what we get responses of is like, that's just not going to work. Just sorry to interrupt, but when you say composting, you're talking specifically about food waste. Oh, that's a good clarification, actually. So composting, when you look at the regulations, definitions refer specifically to green waste composting. When you specify if you're adding in food waste, it becomes co-composting. Okay. It's a very big distinction because green waste composting is considered a lot less pathogenic, creating things like E. coli and salmonella, things that would be dangerous to public health. So it's not as much liability as if you're doing co-composting. Exactly. Okay. Especially when you look at the regulations, there's a lot shorter and easier permitting if you're just doing green composting. It's called permit by role versus the DOH co-composting permit. But the intention is that we, for styrofoam in particular, is we want to create models and demonstration projects because a lot of what we run into is when we talk about ideas about statewide composting, they're like, oh, it's not going to work. You have too many problems and a lot of speculation. So the goal is that we create these demonstration projects to be able to say, that's not true. We have this data, or that's not true. This worked. So just the ability to demonstrate that things can work, and if not, why? So we can fix them. So interesting. When you come in and say statewide composting project or facility, just kind of like an immediate response from Department of Health is that's not going to happen. Is that kind of the vibe? I mean, Not specifically from DOH. Generally, when you talk about wanting to do large scale things like residential food waste pickup or like, because that happens in other cities and counties, but the reaction here when you, and this is not one specific agency, but just kind of talking like fielding questions from different city and county and state agencies, the reaction is kind of like, oh, you know, we tried that. When you dig a little deeper, it's like, oh, we tried it with like four people. Almost got the statewide. I'm not dogging them, but like, you know, a lot of times you see that it's not, composting in general is not respected and considered a legitimate strategy for managing organic waste. It's being done for the city, it's being done for the city and county, Hawaiian earth products or Hawaiian earth recycling, out in Waipahu, they have a green waste composting facility, very large. They have the city and county's green waste contract. So basically everything that goes in the green bins goes to a large composting center in Waipahu. It's open windrows, so large, large rows of composting. Just open compost piles. Right, it gets turned with a giant, a giant turner, giant machine, but that's just green waste. They have a permit to accept some small bit of food waste, but it's very small. And if they wanted to, they could transition to an in-vessel system, which basically just, everything's contained, air is fed into it. It's kept aerated. And in that case, if they decided to do that, they'd have to invest several million dollars in the technology, and then they could accept a lot of food waste. But they have chosen not to activate that permit yet. Because they don't have a guaranteed stream of food waste. Interesting. So you've got to have the combination of the permit, then you have to have the right technology, which costs a few million dollars at a minimum to put into place. But then you need to have your input, the right amount of product coming from, whether it's restaurants, schools, homes, wherever. And you also have to ensure, if you're going to go down that revenue, that business model, you also have to ensure you have the right trucks, which are very expensive. You have to have the right bonding, the licensing. So there's a lot that goes into creating a large-scale composting system. But then are we talking about creating a city-run or state-run facility or service, or allowing for private entities to kind of develop that? Or is that... When you say they... Or when you say a statewide system, and you're talking about all these things that kind of need to be in place, and the permits, is that a city-run thing? That is, the permitting itself is through Department of Health. So it's a state permit? It's a state permit, yeah. But you also need to have zoning clearances from the Department of Planning of Permitting. If you're going to have a large facility, you have to have permits, national pollutant discharge elimination system permits or exemptions from Clean Water Branch and Clean Air Branch if you're going to have... Is EPA going to evolve too, or is there federal regulations, I would imagine? I'm only aware of the state level and the county level, but I would not be surprised with that. But that just kind of gives you an idea of if you're going to have a large-scale system. But a lot of... Because we don't operate on that level, a lot of the demonstration projects we're looking at are more small-scale, addressing like, okay, if there's millions of dollars to run these facilities, what does it take to run the smaller facilities that are lower cost operate? Like have low operations and maintenance costs, they have low infrastructure costs. What are the ones that could actually effectively compost our food waste and our organics, but someone could get into without spending millions and millions of dollars? That's one of the things we did for the IUCN Composting Project, World Conservation Congress. So yeah, can you talk a little bit? So this was a specific project that you've been working on for well over a year. So with the World Conservation Congress, I was here in Hawaii, first time it's been in the United States. It was a really big deal. This was last month. And yeah, explain a little bit about the project proposal and the process that you went through. Okay, so it all kind of actually started out weird, it's a bunch of non-profit groups. We were just sitting around the table at BeerWorks actually. How much? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. A little shout out to BeerWorks. It's where all the cool people go. And Nicole Chatterson, who was very instrumental in helping create the Green Team, because originally they weren't planning on having any kind of team devoted to sustainability of the Congress. IUCN was working, IUCN is a group that put on the Conservation Congress. They were working through CUPU and they were like, we've been told they want to make this Congress green. Right. How do we do that? And so it was actually really exciting as a member of the non-profit community, because normally when you have events or people that want to green, what they really want is like, what can we tell people we're doing but not really do that much. So it was really exciting because they really wanted to actually do something that mattered. And it makes sense, I mean it's a World Conservation Congress and the IUCN, I mean this is the main stage for addressing major conservation issues in the world. So I mean it makes sense, it goes hand in hand. Absolutely. And what we proceeded basically was that we spent the next year, initially it was just brainstorming like, okay what can we do? What do we want to address? We want to address plastic, we want to address water consumption, we want to address waste. And that's kind of where I came in, initially we were talking about zero waste, which a lot of people poo poo, the reaction is that can't work. And my experience from doing this project is it absolutely can work, but you have to ask yourself questions about what you're willing to spend budget on, what you're willing to put extra effort into. It's a big endeavor. And you have to ask yourself what am I willing to create a whole new system, because it takes work, a lot of work, because you're shifting the paradigm. But we basically initially started out as awesome, we're only going to use reusable's, so we don't have to worry about single use items, so we just have to worry about the food waste. And I was kind of like, oh, I don't know, the commission center is already giving their food waste that they create in the back of the kitchen to Ecofeed, which is, they pick up from restaurants and events here in Oahu and send that to Piggeries. So it's a higher and better use than landfilling, you can see it on the screen there, that's one of Kupu's pictures, a local Piggery. And so basically what they're doing is they're already capturing that food waste and not composting it, but putting it as direct feed for Piggeries. Correct, and so it's, are you guys familiar with the EPA hierarchy of disposal preferences? Not as much as I used to be, maybe you could refresh your memory. If you'll allow me to refresh you. For sure. Okay, great, thank you. So it's this little pyramid, and it basically says the EPA and a lot of counties and states have adopted the same model, it's basically like, if you're going to dispose of materials, here's our preference, here's a hierarchy preference, at the very bottom is landfilling. One up from that is incineration, so like waste to energy facilities like we have here at H-Power. Next one up is actually composting, and above that is feeding animals, feeding people, and then source reduction, source reduction being like don't create the waste to begin with. So even though we knew that they were already diverting to Piggeries, which is absolutely a higher and better use than burning or landfilling, it seemed like a very large opportunity, a very big stage to try something bigger, and you know the conversation kept happening like, who needs this more, like what can we do to support farmers, what can we do to create closed loop systems on Hawaii. So I kind of, not volunteer the farmers, but I put out there like, hey, what do we, what do you want me to do? So we're going to leave it in suspense like that for just 60 seconds, and get more into detail about the kind of specific relationship and logistics of working with the farmers and kind of the benefits they got out of the project or potential. Okay, we'll be right back. Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart, Turner, host of Sustainable Hawaii. Thanks for watching Think Tech this summer. We have a lot of terrific shows of great importance, and I hope you'll watch my show too every Tuesday at noon as we address sustainability issues for Hawaii. They're really pertinent as the World Conservation Congress approaches in September, and the World Youth Congress that's focusing on sustainability next year as well. Have a great summer and tune in at noon every Tuesday. Good afternoon, Howard Wiig, Code Green, ThinkTechHawaii.com. I appear on Mondays at three o'clock, and my gig is energy efficiency, doing more with less. It's the most cost-effective way that we in Hawaii are going to achieve 100% clean energy by the year 2045. I look forward to being with you. Aloha. And welcome back to Hawaii Food and Farmers Series. I'm your co-host, Justine Espiritu. This is my co-host, Matthew Johnson. We have Jennifer, president of Syrophobia on today, and co-co-host James McKay, who we're gearing up to take over for the next couple of weeks. James, why don't you start us off with a brief summary and where we're leading into at this next segment with Jennifer? Well, I think we're just at the point where I'm trying to find out the best use for the food resource, because really that's what food waste is a resource. So it gives you the ability to either use it effectively, which should be the higher up the scale of that EPA guy that Jennifer just referred to, or to basically waste it and have really no value. Landfill is actually a cost, so this segment's about waste to revenue. So how do we make the most of the resource that we have the opportunity to use? That's really what the discussion is about. So it's creating a business model to make the most of that resource in every way possible. So moving up the food scale, farmers need good soil to grow good food. So as the soil is depleted, or maybe pesticides or other things, we want to use compost to regenerate the soil and all the active enzymes and bacteria and good stuff in the soil. So our food locally will be better for us. So this kind of works pretty important because if someone doesn't start this deviation away from business as usual, we're going to have the same old, same old. So it does take more work to do really the best thing and move up the scale of making the most of a resource. So it's actually having the guys' hands on the ground doing the job. So I spent a lot of time at the convention just seeing what was going on. I wasn't definitely focused on this side of the convention. There was a lot of other cooler stuff going on. Sorry. Not true. Not true. We're like, prop it up and then you cut it. This is important. But it's hard like seeing the guys at the convention center, they're trained to just throw everything out. They're not trained to segregate plastic from food. So yeah, there was everyone just thinking it's easy to just put it all in one side and it'll magically sort itself out. Which to some degree in Hawaii, that's true on the waste diversion side. They do extract some stuff from our waste stream, but in this program we really just want to keep the food or the organic material that you can compost healthily into one area that's not contaminated. So I saw that that was a real struggle in this program. I don't know if that's accurate from what you found. Absolutely. Yeah. Going through it better. As long as you can't dispose of a plastic fork and it's going to grow into great soil, it just doesn't happen. Well, so styrophobia kind of has us in their mission and thinking about it. So tell us a little bit about that process of, okay, you said you kind of like peer pressured the farmers to join you, or? That would have been an over misting. Yeah. So I'm kind of curious of how these kind of relationships and partnerships get established and then to kind of, you know, move forward with doing the systematic change that you're talking about. Well, thank you for asking this, Dean. That's our job. Yes. Okay. Good job. So it's actually really cool because you, you know, you get to have these nice relationships with farmers just on a personal level and you get, you know, you get to talking about the things that they're passionate about. And talking to this great group of farmers is called Friends with Farms. And it's a who you have farmers and they basically come together and they share resources and they share the business burden of paying for things. They also share the benefits too. So we kind of approached them and they, before we even talked about this project, they were indicating that they were considering becoming like a haul, like a legitimate hauling service for food waste from restaurants, like becoming an eco feed but not sending it to pigories, bringing it back to their farms and using it in their compost because I think you guys have probably covered this at some point in your shows is the cost of amendments, the cost of fertilizers, the cost of compost in general, like a lot of farmers have to import that and it's a major cost for them. And we talk all the time about how do we bring down the cost of local food? One of the ways to do that is to bring down the cost of amendments. So the idea being that if they can, in their community, how far out they want to go, they can pick up food waste from restaurants. Like for example, Isle of Nala is very close to them. They have a ton of food scraps that they could just go from their farm, bring it back and add it to a compost pile. So they indicated to me that that was a goal of theirs. And I knew the Congress, that's why they have acronyms. What do you think of acronyms? The WCC was happening and it seemed like a good opportunity to test that model, which is kind of in our mission anyways, like create these models. And this was a good opportunity to be like largest environmental conference in the history of the United States, 10 to 12,000 people at one time, like if we can figure out what's going to go wrong here, we can definitely scale it down for smaller events. So I got told it was very ambitious and it was a lot of work. Like I said, work for a year, figuring out, working with the convention center staff, their operations managers, figuring out when do things need to get picked up, what kind of bins do we need, what kind of signage do we need. It's all very important. And it's literally, I mean, you started a year out. A year out, a year out. And we worked on signage, like what kind of things are going to grab people's attention so they know where to put things, how many bins do you need, what do you want to leave out? Like initially when we talked about zero waste, we talked about not having any trash bins. Wow. Because we're not going to have anyway, so we don't even need a trash bin. Well, yeah, it was one of those things that we knew there was going to be issues. But it was like the convention center is thinking, as a reasonable thought was like in the future, people are, conferences are going to be coming to them going like, we want to go zero waste. They want to be prepared for that. So they're thinking like this is a good opportunity to test. And that's what the convention center's thought was, wow. So they were incredibly supportive. Their operations managers, like their housekeeping staff, like instead of getting pushback of like, no, we can't do that, it was like, great, let's try it. Oh. And it was really refreshing. Yeah. The only naysayers we had were actually kind of higher up at the IUCN staff. It was like, let's not over promise. We got to put on a good event. So that was the only real, everyone else was super supportive and wanted to try stuff. Which I mean, a certain degree doesn't make sense. I mean, they have a lot they're trying to do with the IUCN. So they got to pick and choose their battles. And it does. And that was actually kind of that intersection kind of illustrates the difference in priorities. For the convention center, though they're very supportive, their main goal is to put on a good event. They felt like if they weren't prepared, for certain scenarios, they might have forks sitting around or like trash overflowing and things like that. So they're worried about how the aesthetic, whereas our perception was like, we want to go zero waste. Like what can we do for that? So it was awesome working with them, but also seeing where some of the priorities differed. But they were very supportive. And if I can mention a quick, in terms of the goals of the pilot, initially it was food waste, when we were going to only use reusable. But as the plan progressed, it turns out that we weren't able to use reusable like China or metal forks or things like that. Because they're going to do concession. And so normally when they do buffet, they just use reusable like utensils and plates and cups and things like that. And they just take them back and wash them. But when you have an event where someone pays something and they take it away, they're worried about collecting all those things. So we were like, okay, we have to use disposables. And that was by no means the goal. But it kind of like progressed into that. And we're like, okay, crap. Well, if we're going to use disposables, like single use items, let's at least make them compostable. And then the goal of the composting pilot, and actually here on the screen, you can kind of see that's like a small fraction, maybe of 35% of the single use compost with utensils we collected. Over the whole two weeks. Over the whole 10 days, yeah. But 10 days, 35, exactly. And that's a big part of what Starifobia does, right? Is distributing compostable utensils and dishware? That was initially when Starifobia started as a for-profit entity, which distributed compostable products. A few years ago we transitioned to a non-profit. So we don't actually sell any products anymore. And ultimately like we want to go towards reusable. Like we don't necessarily advocate for even compostable products because there's still an association with waste created. Like it's a single use item that's still gonna be waste, even if it's less waste than a regular plastic. But I just want to point out the pilot morphed into just getting the food waste to farmers to an opportunity to test if we collected the compostable products, could we compost it outside like in a regular hot compost pile that farmers? Because normally those products like the corn-based polymers and like the plastic cups, the corn-based plastics, they say they can only be broken down in a facility that's like an in-vessel commercial scale composting facility. Because it gets really hot like 200 degrees. But our thought was... And that's always been a complete of these compostable products. It sounds really good when a restaurant is selling that, but if it's just going into the trash can like a normal piece of trash, then it's not really doing the intent of the purpose of the product. It's not completing the goal, but you are saving resources at the front end. But yeah, so our goal kind of became, all right, let's not only capture this and kind of document just how much is being created, how much compostable material is being created, but let's see if we can take these hot compost piles that are done by farmers outdoors, let's chip up all these materials which normally doesn't happen at an in-vessel composting system. They just put them in whole. Let's chip it up and see if the increased surface area on all the products allows it, that's an in-vessel composting system. Where is that? That's just, that's something I pulled off the internet. That's nice. So it's just an example. It's just an example, yeah. It's not in your front yard right now. It's not in my front yard. But basically the idea being that we test whether or not local farmers on a small scale could break down these compostable products without million dollar facilities to do it. Because if they could, like let's say, let's talk about Isle of Nala again, if they have those fiber clam shells and if they decide to use corn-based utensils, not only would the farmers be able to take the food waste, they'd be able to take the compostables as well. It increases their materials, but it also decreases the restaurant's material they have to pay to dispose of. And that could be composted together then. That's one of the things we wanted to test. So that was a goal to kind of test these two different lines of compost, the food waste and then these compostable, while one-time use products. Exactly. And that's something that you, that there's certain requirements that you need to fulfill. You need to have a permit to be able to do this. Exactly, yeah. And that's the big question mark is how did it go? So these, we've talked a lot. We were all just waiting. We've talked a lot about what the intentions were. Let's get down to the meat of it, like what actually happened. So when I set out in the process to get the, because like I said, you have to have a Department of Health permit to do co-composting. So in order for us to take the convention centers, food waste and their compostable products to the farming, to the composting site, create a composting pile, we would have had to have that permit. So I started that permit a year out. And I, when I started, I had no inclination how long it would take me. It took me a year to write. It ended up being 218 pages. Wow. And the reason being that there, in other states and municipalities, they have a tiered system. Like if you're going to have a small composting system, you fill out a less complex permit. You know, and as it goes up, Makes sense. You know, it does make sense. You're allowing for different sized entities, but here it turns out, and I discovered all this in the process, I had to fill out the same co-composting permit than Hawaiian Earth products had to fill out. So a facility that's handling the organic material for the entire island, I had to fill out the exact same application. So then did you kind of come up with the idea of this like tiered permitting system? Or is that something you saw, like after you started this, you're like, oh, how is this being done in other places? Is there like cities or states that you saw a good example of, here's kind of what we were trying to do over there. Maybe we can. It occurred to me while I was doing it. And then I went and found examples. So it was just kind of like, this doesn't make any sense. What were some of the good examples? Sorry? What were some of the good examples? What were cities that had? You see it in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, kind of like the typical cities that- The hippie cities. It is. A lot of cities in Vermont, like a lot of states have the tiered system too. It's common, it makes sense that you would have, you would adjust your permitting based on the size and the level of risk. Basically, because that's the Department of Health's job, you know, the protecting public health, protecting health in general. So it makes sense for a large facility to have that level, but I don't believe it makes sense to have it for like a farmer that wants to, you know, collect a small bit of food waste. And ultimately what happened was, you know, they cliffhanger, the permit didn't come through in time. So, you know, we'd prepared everything, this, you know, the signage, the logistics plans, the pickup schedules, everything was ready. So it was heart-wrenching the idea of pulling the plug and just going back to throwing everything away. So the compromise we decided on was that, you know, we still pick up, we still collect on the floor. I think we have the signs of the composting bins or the trash bins at the, oh, sorry, I guess we got it. No, I guess we don't, never mind. But so we only actually have a minute left. So if you want to wrap it up by kind of maybe saying what the next steps, if we do have these examples of a tiered system, is that like a mission you're taking on to adapt? Absolutely, we want to work directly with the Department of Agriculture, Department of Health to adjust these regulations because you look at the regulations and exemptions, there's lots of opportunity to amend that. And I think it would have a much better system that allows for these smaller regional composting systems that I think would be better serving the communities than just a central one. So that's something, styrophobia is going to spearhead or that food waste group? There's also food waste recovery, who are we going on? It's kind of different inter-agencies, counties, nonprofits come together for food waste at all the different levels. But that, and I think number one thing is too is a huge value perception of, like James had mentioned, the value perception shift of food waste and organics as a resource, not because the city and counties, sorry the different counties treat it like something that needs to be gotten rid of, something as a burden. And we have to shift that perception of, these are resources that we have an opportunity to benefit from. And I think that'll shift the whole conversation. Right, and James is going to spearhead that conversation next week. So we're out of time, thank you so much Jennifer for coming on and sharing your story and kind of what's next for that. It's really exciting to see that progression. Thanks for joining us, James. And we will see you here next week. I will see myself.