TORUS attempts to optimize food waste management by providing a free market for food waste related information and stakeholders to ensure that the allocation of the waste is effective and environmentally friendly. Furthermore, TORUS aims to create a fluid food waste system that would fill the void in the current fallible and ineffective system throughout the United States. Currently the team has 121 MVP users while connecting our program to 5 different composting companies in New Jersey. Our core 6 have focused heavily on making sure that families and organizations can comfortably dispose of food waste in an environmentally friendly manner that follows New Jersey state regulations. This act of helping private groups composting food with environmental concern will start the change needed in the world to ensure that food waste is always composted and can be recycled for a better use.
The summer of 2023, I noticed that the US wastes 33% of all food produced in the country and 1 in 8 Americans suffer from food insecurity (Link of below). Immediately, I began brainstorming potential solutions with my friends and family, trying to create a novel product to solve food waste, whether that's to increase shelf life, reduce plate waste, or compost better. However, all our ideas already existed, yet food waste was obviously a problem, and so I realized that connecting food waste solutions to those that generate food waste would be the most optimal way to address food waste as all solutions already exist, but were too costly or too inconvenient to scale.
So I decided to focus on composting, seeing as the high prices of composting companies in NJ limited their reach and many homeowners we talked to expressed interest. So, raised $2640 from Green Matters, a company providing grants for highschoolers working on sustainability initiatives to pay a composting company to pick up food waste for 38 households in West Windsor. This has continued until June 9th, where now we continue the free service, but with our own system.
While building out the pilot program through chatting with neighbors and going door to door to find interested people and try to motivate environmentalism in our neighbors, we also explored providing a much cheaper composting service. We, a team of 9, decided to leverage 3rd party drivers, similar to Uber’s business model, to pick up food waste.
Currently, we’ve signed up 13 houses to the paid program. Going forward, we hope to give back to the community and help address hunger, so we’ve added a service option, where much of the service fee is donated to charities to provide meals for those in need. By the end of summer 2024, we hope to shift this into a sponsorship program, where a service option for our customers will be to use their subscription to sponsor meals for specific families in need!! We hope that through these actions we can incentivize even more composting of food waste and help address hunger in NJ!
Korean New york Daily Eunice Chung / Steven Choi
(LINK)
New Jersey Lawrenceville High School Team Members - https://zkjiang12.wixsite.com/torus-3
Zikang Jiang (11) Kevin Chung (11) Ethan Zhu (10) Gianco Iasiello (11) Shailen Zimmerman (11) Andrew Yang (10) Matthew Gao (10) Anthony Woo (10) Aryan Kumar (11) |
Read More: https://newyorkilbo.com/43315