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Saving the Kitchen Scraps

Sophia Hollander Dec 1 , 2015

Garbage has gotten organized.

Baldor Specialty Foods, a produce supplier based in the Bronx, is the latest—and perhaps largest—company to announce it will be repurposing fruit and vegetable scraps instead of dumping them.

Although they had been exploring composting for years, “unfortunately the landfill was so much cheaper than any other option,” said marketing director Benjamin Walker. “We no longer want to do that.”

In the past few weeks the company has started reaching out to juicing companies and broth-centric businesses like Brodo in the East Village, offering scraps like carrot skins, pineapple cores and strawberry tops as part of a program dubbed SparCs (scraps spelled backwards). The project was inspired by a collaboration with Dan Barber’s restaurant Blue Hill on its WastED project earlier this year.

Pigs are another possibility for harder to place items like melon peels, mango pits and beet skins. Baldor officials said they recently tested the scraps on pigs at a farm upstate. The reviews?

“They loved it,” said program director Thomas McQuillan. “We think we’ll have happier pigs.”