Kyle Rabin serves as Director of GRACE’s Water and Energy Programs. Kyle holds an M.S. in Environmental Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry and a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Binghamton University. Prior to GRACE, Kyle served as Executive Director at Friends of the Bay (Oyster Bay, NY) and worked as a senior policy analyst and campaign director at Riverkeeper, Inc. He began his work in the environmental arena in 1998 as an air and energy program associate at Environmental Advocates of New York. Kyle and his family live in an energy efficient home, meeting half of their electricity needs with a solar electric system.
Grocery stores do it. So do restaurants. Schools, farmers, you and I. We all waste food. At the local, state and federal level, discarded food is widely recognized as a serious environmental and socioeconomic problem. Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched a national Food Waste Challenge to encourage reduction of food waste. Read more
Thin Mints, Samoas, Peanut Butter Patties… Girl Scout cookie selling season is underway. This year, however, it kicked off with some unwanted controversy. No, not the hullabaloo about the Girl Scout who was rebuked for trying to sell cookies online. I’m referring to the ruckus that followed a CBS Los Angeles story that investigated what happened to 13,200 boxes of “perfectly fine” – not even expired – Girl Scout cookies. Reporter David Goldstein tracked the cookies back to the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council in Redlands, California, and got video footage of a tractor crushing the boxes before they were sent to the landfill. A worker looking on joyfully cheered “Goodbye, Girl Scout cookies!” Read more
With nearly 100 percent certainty I can assure you we won’t be hearing President Barack Obama and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, or their respective surrogates, talking about America’s food waste dilemma (or what I and others would describe as a crisis) in the months ahead. That’s too bad since food waste is creating significant social, economic and environmental consequences for the US (and the world).
This growing crisis and the fact that discarded food provides a unique lens through which to view the water/energy/agriculture nexus (a topic of great interest to us here at GRACE and Ecocentric), prompted me to take a closer look at the food that goes uneaten and how it impacts Americans. While researching this trending topic, I learned some interesting facts I thought I’d share. Read more
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