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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Environment
Victoria Namkung

From trash to table: will upcycled food save the planet?

Composite of two studio images. On the left is a pile of half-eaten food and clean recycling, and on the right is a picture of a bag of something called 'Pulp Chips,' which are small, orange-ish square.
Pulp Chips, right, are created from the leftover pulp from cold-pressed juice. Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images/Pulp Pantry

When Kaitlin Mogentale was studying environmental science at the University of Southern California, she watched a friend juice a carrot and noticed the waste it produced – and wondered what was happening to all of the pulp from Los Angeles’s juice shops. She later learned that most of it was being sent to landfills, where food waste contributes to more methane emissions than any other landfilled matter.

“I was a college student, very young and naive, and I think that’s the recipe you need to get into the business,” said Mogentale, who founded Pulp Pantry, makers of fiber-filled Pulp Chips, which are created from the leftover pulp from cold-pressed juice. Mogentale said the company goes to juice-production facilities and collects 10,000lb (4,536kg) of pulp at a time – one day’s worth of leftovers – then transfers it in temperature-controlled trucks back to its manufacturer to make the chips.

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