[Music]

[Applause]

Americans generate more than a hundred

billion pounds of food waste each year

Governor Christie signed a package of

bills that would give the state

departments of Environmental Protection

and agriculture one year to come up with

a plan for reducing reusing or recycling

the state's share of all that garbage as

part of our ongoing series peril and

promise the challenge of climate change

the bill's sponsor State Senator Bob

Smith joins Lindsay Christian so let's

talk of food waste you have you're the

chairman of the Senate in an Energy

Environment Committee and you sponsored

a bill that would aim to reduce food

waste in the state by 50 percent over

the next 13 years that's a pretty lofty

and ambitious goal senator what is the

plan of action to accomplish this well

the legislation that passed that's

exactly that goal for the state of New

Jersey and says to the Department of

Environmental Protection and the

Department of Energy that they need to

start putting a plan together to get

that 50% reduction one of the things

that's usually startling to people in

this country is to know that they waste

about 40% of the food that's on their

tables every year and that amounts to

about 160 billion pounds of food wasted

every year and that's in the context of

an awful lot of families that are food

insecure and a tremendous impact on the

environment the our federal government

estimates that we had more than 42

million people who are considered to be

food insecure and people don't think

about food in terms of its own

environmental impact but food consumes a

great deal of water fertilizers uses

fuel to be produced and when it decays

there's a whole bunch of greenhouse gas

emissions that affects global climate

change so food has a tremendous impact

on the planet and everything we can do

to reduce food waste is good for it can

be used to help food

your families it also can be used to

reduce the impact on the environment

senator Smith you touched on several

points global climate food and secure

families but I want to hit home on how

is consumers can we help to achieve this

goal of reducing food waste what can we

do at home what can we do at work to

really make this happen well obviously

some common sense kind of things like

actually planning what meals you're

going to consume at home buying the

appropriate quantities it would be very

important as well for the food industry

that proper labeling so that various

types of food and the containers in

which they're placed can be donated to

food insecure families so there needs to

be some uniformity in that labeling we

also need to set up in New Jersey or

encourage the set up in New Jersey of

food recycling facilities and one of the

bills in this package there was actually

my five or six bills that we passed or

that are on the table right now for the

food waste problem one of them

encourages the establishment of food

recycling facilities from large waste

generators if they generate more than 52

tons a year then they're required to

take into a food recycling facility and

in the food recycling facility it can be

converted either into energy materials

or into compost how damaging is food

waste to our environment

well methane as a gas is 20 to 30 times

more as 20 to 30 times more impact than

carbon dioxide and these are greenhouse

gases meaning that they they form a

layer in the Earth's atmosphere that

retains heat and causes this global

warming you just recently saw a major

chunk of the of our polar ice caps

breaking off because of these rising

temperatures were seeing more and more

super storms like superstorm sandy so

global climate change is a real threat

to human

entity and every time we can reduce

methane production into the atmosphere

or even carbon dioxide production to the

atmosphere we are helping to stabilize

and decrease the rate in which our

planet is warming senator Smith thank

you for joining us today thank you very

very much

[Music]