Month: August 2020

By Kristy Pickurel

The Impact of COVID-19 on Packaging, Safety and Food Waste:
Clemson Creative Inquiry sponsored by Sonoco FRESH

Mint Innovations Team
Dakota Cook, Maria Camargo, Brennan Morgan, Ana Romero*
*Team Mentor

The Clemson COVID Challenge was a summer 2020 virtual research and design opportunity for teams of undergraduates to work on problems related to the current COVID-19 situation as well as future possible pandemics. Teams of students worked with mentors to identify problems and come up with proposed ideas and solutions. In mid-June, students submitted a pitch video of their ideas and competed for the opportunity to see their projects possibly continue to implementation. Sonoco FRESH sponsored a Creative Inquiry (CI) team to look at the impact of COVID-19 on packaging, safety and food waste. Below is a summary of the team’s project and a link to the team’s poster presentation.

When COVID-19 started to spread quickly across the country in early March 2020, restaurants, bars and many other places started closing. The resulting shift in food demand, combined with a change in consumer behavior, caused a strain in the supply chain.

The CI team members performed literature reviews, interviews with corporate experts in packaging and agriculture, brainstormed potential solutions and created a 3-minute video pitch describing their proposed solution of vacuum packaging.

Vacuum packaging is a type of packaging that extends shelf life by removing oxygen and preserves quality of food and increases shelf life by eliminating growth of spoilage bacteria (aerobic bacteria). Extending shelf life reduces food waste, and the tamper evident packaging will add an additional layer of comfort and safety in consumers’ minds.

View the Team’s Poster Presentation

The mission of the Sonoco FRESH initiative is to have a major impact on the safety, security and sustainability of food. This means looking holistically at the food life cycle and identifying opportunities that reimagine processes, technologies and behaviors. More information on the Sonoco FRESH initiative can be found at www.clemson.edu/SonocoFRESH.

By Kristy Pickurel

Clemson University’s Recycling Services department manages a compost site which processes food waste from campus. The site is located at the Cherry Crossing Research Facility. Just like the rest of us it has been greatly impacted by COVID-19, but work at the site has not stopped. Student interns Matthew Lawrence and Jared Montgomery were kind enough to give FRESH a tour of the facility earlier this spring.

Food scraps, paper towel waste and yard waste are generated and collected on campus in green composting bins. Clemson’s recycling staff picks the bins up and takes them to the Cherry Crossing facility, where the organic waste is dumped onto a bed of wood chips. The chips and waste are mixed thoroughly to create a pile.

This mixture then undergoes a 6-week process of progressing piles, ending with the cure pile, which is loaded into a trommel and sifted into the final product of sifted compost. The sifted compost can be land applied or used as soil amendment. The compost piles are turned every other day to make sure they are aerated properly and decomposing as quickly as they can.

Clemson’s composting program began with a $25,000 grant from the South Carolina DHEC Office of Waste & Recycling, which allowed the university to purchase an in-vessel composter that is still in use today. An alternative to the manual process just described, the composter processes waste much more quickly. Waste and wood chips are combined in the unit’s mixer and then sent to the tumbler. The tumbler rotates once every hour and helps to accelerate the process.

Cherry Crossing’s final compost product is used by campus landscaping as well as the student organic farm. This past year a large majority went to Musser Fruit Farm, Clemson’s fruit research farm. The compost is also typically sold to the community, but sales were suspended at the time of our tour. With Clemson’s campus shutting down as a result of the pandemic, there had been an extreme shortage of food waste produced from campus. Before the campus closed due to COVID-19, the recycling staff was picking up about 48 bins per day. Now they’re only collected an average of 10 bins a week.

Aside from the effects of the pandemic, the composting program’s biggest challenge is contamination, i.e. items that can’t be composted being placed in the composting bins. These include film plastics such as plastic bags and saran wrap, as well as metal forks and plastic cups from the dining halls. According to Lawrence, Clemson’s composting program was constantly expanding until the virus hit. Since he began interning with the program in November of 2019, composting bins have been placed in two new POD (provisions on demand) markets on campus. The team has also started a community garden at the Cherry Crossing facility and hopes to begin distributing the fruits of its plants in the near future.

For more information on Clemson’s composting and recycling programs, please visit the Clemson Website.

The mission of the Sonoco FRESH initiative is to have a major impact on the safety, security and sustainability of food. This means looking holistically at the food life cycle and identifying opportunities that reimagine processes, technologies and behaviors. More information on the Sonoco FRESH initiative can be found at www.clemson.edu/SonocoFRESH.

Visit the FRESH YouTube Channel to view a video of the tour.