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food / travel

What To Do With Horsemeat Lasagna? Turn It Into Biogas!

DIE WELT (Germany), THE LOCAL (Sweden)

Worldcrunch

BERLIN - Among the many questions raised by Europe's spreading horsemeat scandal is what to do with all the products of questionable provenance. Most major supermarkets have simply dumped out loads of horse-tainted "beef" lasagna, and the like. What a waste!

But all's not lost. A spokeswoman for the German company Tengelmann, whose Kaiser’s supermarket chain found horsemeat in their discount “beef” lasagna, told daily Die Welt that since “these products do not pose a health danger we are disposing of them in the usual way.”

The "usual way" is dumping it into containers where the stores dump spoiled foods or products past their sell-by date, which wind up as biogas! Companies like ReFood and BioCycling collect such containers of leftovers from restaurants and cantines, as well as discarded food products from retailers, make a business of recycling such refuse.

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ReFood Germany, for example, has 300 trucks that collect 400,000 tons of discarded foods annually, making it one of the country’s biggest providers of this service. At its German biogas facilities ReFood produces enough electricity to supply 7,000 households. Together with its facilities in Great Britain and France, the firm produces a total of 20 megawatts of energy by recycling foods.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, retail chain Ica announced that it was going to deliver recalled products to a recycling station in Ängelholm where they would be converted to biogas, The Local reports.

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FOCUS: Israel-Palestine War

After The War, After Abbas: Who's Most Likely To Be The Future Palestinian Leader

Israel and the West have often asked bitterly: Where is the Palestinian Mandela? The divided regimes between Gaza and the West Bank continues to make it difficult to imagine the future Palestinian leader. Still, these three names are worth considering.

Photograph of Palestinian artists working on a mural that shows the  jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghout. A little girl watches them work.

April 12, 2023: Palestinian artists work by a mural shows jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza.

Nidal Al-Wahidi/ZUMA
Elias Kassem

Israel has set two goals for its Gaza war: destroying Hamas and releasing hostages.

But it has no answer to, nor is even asking the question: What comes next?

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the return of the current Palestinian Authority to govern post-war Gaza. That stance seems opposed to the U.S. Administration’s call to revitalize the Palestinian Authority (PA) to assume power in the coastal enclave.

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But neither Israel nor the U.S. put a detailed plan for a governing body in post-war Gaza, let alone offering a vision for a bonafide Palestinian state that would also encompass the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority, which administers much of the occupied West Bank, was created in1994 as part of the Oslo Accords peace agreement. It’s now led by President Mahmoud Abbas, who succeeded Yasser Arafat in 2005. Over the past few years, the question of who would succeed Abbas, now 88 years old, has largely dominated internal Palestinian politics.

But that question has gained new urgency — and was fundamentally altered — with the war in Gaza.

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