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Dive Overview:
- Walmart and organic recycler Denali Introducing technology to “unpackage” food waste The facilities have been built behind more than 1,400 Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, RJ Zanes, Walmart’s U.S. vice president of facility services, said in an internal company post on Monday.
- In this solution, workers toss expired food into a container, after which Denali’s technology separates the food from the packaging.
- Walmart said the “depackaging” program, called “Zero Depack,” increases associate efficiency while supporting the retailer’s long-term sustainability goals.
Dive Insights:
Walmart says Zero Depak helps it reuse food, such as by turning expired food into nutritious products for farmers, rather than throwing it away.
“To recycle unsellable packaged foods, the food must first be removed from its packaging,” Zanes wrote. “Previously, this was a time-consuming task that required employees to manually remove fresh foods, like vegetables and meat, from their packaging.”
Denali says the machine can separate up to 97 percent of trash from organic food waste, Zanes writes. One Denali truck traveled to an organic waste recycling facility and picked up 11 tons of organic waste from 18 Walmart stores.
Last fall, Walmart partnered with Denali to become a retailer. Food waste recycling implemented at locations across the U.S..
The United States is approximately 77.6 million tonnes of food waste That will be in 2022, according to ReFed data cited by Zanes.
Walmart’s sustainability goals include: Food waste halved Compared to the 2016 standard value, by 2030, by 2023 Walmart cuts food waste by 12%According to the company’s report.
