Published on January 06, 2023
Food Rescue MAINE is launching the Maine Home Food Waste Challenge 2023 on January 9th. Join the Maine Home Food Waste Challenge 2023 and compete with your fellow Mainers to reduce your weekly food waste – and save money, time, and the planet!
The Maine Home Food Waste Challenge is a fun and easy way to help you waste less food and enjoy the proven benefits:
- Save on Food Costs
- Stretch Your Food Dollars
- Save Wasted Food, Water and Energy
- Help Fight Climate Change
Challenge participants will receive simple instructions, tips, reminders and even Facebook and local support group links to make it easy to take part in this friendly statewide competition.
The Maine Home Food Waste Challenge 2023 will officially start on Monday, January 9, 2023 and continue for four weeks.
All you have to do to participate is:
1. Register
2. Measure how much food waste you produce each week
3. Report by completing an easy-to-fill-out form.
A "Leaderboard" will enable you to view your weekly food waste results and compete for the title of "Maine Food Rescue Hero" along with other fun weekly awards! And remember -- Maine food. It's too good to waste!
Food Rescue MAINE is a multidisciplinary team based at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine. Our mission is to provide stakeholder-driven, sustainable “triple bottom line” solutions to end food waste and loss in Maine.
In 2015, we identified eliminating food waste as the single most important issue to ensure a more sustainable waste system in Maine. In 2019, an interdisciplinary team was funded to help identify triple-bottom-line solutions to address this issue in Maine.
Following the Mitchell Center's research approach, our team worked with Maine’s major food businesses and organizations including retailers, distributors, farmers, manufacturers, hospitality, hospitals, schools, Congresswoman Pingree’s office, and others to identify stakeholder-driven food waste solutions that would deliver major economic, social and environmental benefits for Maine. We combined this with best-practice research looking for successful global, national, and regional solutions to end food waste. Finally, we utilized the Maine Dept. of Environmental Protection's (DEP) Food Recovery Hierarchy to ensure that our solutions followed the reduction/recovery/recycling model.