COLUMBIA, Mo. • The students and faculty who eat at the University of Missouri's Columbia campus dining halls throw tons and tons of food away every year. And Tim Reinbott has a master plan for it.
Reinbott runs the Bradford Research Center, the university's farm, where faculty conduct research on everything from crop pests to fish farming. A couple of years ago, he was talking to Eric Cartwright, who runs the university's dining system, about the massive amounts of food discarded by students and the scraps left over after food is prepared — about a million pounds a year.
"That got us thinking," Reinbott said. "Maybe we can do something with this?"
So Reinbott rounded up other university employees and several students to devise a closed-loop food system — a system that recycles food waste into fertilizer, which in turn is used to grow food.
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