2023 Food Waste Solutions Summit
May 16-18, 2023 | St.Louis, MO
Caroline Barry
Program Manager
Closed Loop Partners
Bio:
Caroline Barry is a Program Manager at Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy, a leading investment firm, innovation center, and recycling operator at the forefront of the circular economy. The Center unites competitors and partners to tackle complex material challenges and implement systemic change to advance circularity and create a future in which materials are shared, reused, and continuously cycled. Caroline co-leads the Center’s Composting Consortium, a multi-year collaboration across the entire compostable packaging value chain to pilot industry-wide solutions and build a roadmap for investment in technologies and infrastructure that enable the recovery of compostable food scraps and food-contact compostable packaging. She holds a Master’s degree in Sustainable Food Systems from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Schedule
Wednesday, May 17th
11:00am - 12:00pm
From Garbage to Gold: Uncovering the Value of Recycling, Composting, and Anaerobic Digestion
Breakout Session (Running Concurrently)
Nearly 70% of surplus food is treated as true “waste,” meaning it is either left in the fields after harvest, incinerated, dumped, deposited in the sewer, sent to landfill, or applied to the land. But much of this could have been used for other purposes — in fact, recycling and composting offer one of the largest opportunities for decreasing the amount of waste in our food system. What can be done to ensure we’re finding the highest and best use for any food or scraps that remain? While there are many sites today in the U.S. that utilize anaerobic digesters, very few are dedicated to processing food scraps. This session will dig up the value of composting and anaerobic digestion, unveil the adoption of these solutions, and bring to the surface the infrastructure gaps that hinder these efforts.