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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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Green

Droughts To Floods, Italy As Poster Child Of Our Climate Emergency

Floods have hit northern Italy after the longest drought in two centuries. Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini explains how these increasingly frequent events are being exacerbated by human activity.

A woman in yellow stands crying on a bridge surrounded by floodwater

Frederica Pizzuto cries after she sees her newly renovated house for the first time after it has been devastated by a meters-high flood wave.

Oliver Weiken/DPA via ZUMA
Carlo Petrini

-Analysis-

FAENZA By now it is undeniable: on the Italian peninsula, the climate crisis is evident in very opposing extreme events (think drought and floods), which occur close together and with increasing frequency. Until just a few days ago, almost the entire country was gripped by the longest drought in two centuries.

Now, however, extreme rainfall has hit the state of Emilia Romagna in the north of the country causing casualties and displacing over 10,000 people.

In 18 hours, the amount of rain that falls on average in a month has fallen. This has caused all rivers to overflow, flooding lowland towns and cutting off hillside towns due to landslides on many roads. Fields have become lakes and orchards that were at a crucial stage of ripening have been severely damaged.

It would be a blessing if this dreadful situation were a sporadic and isolated phenomenon, but unfortunately this is not the case.

What will happen tomorrow is unknown, yet we know it will happen.

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