Chinatown in New York City is full of rich Chinese Heritage ranging from various restaurants to public Mahjong meet ups. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Chinatown is how they get their food and distribute it. Most other restaurants in NYC get their food from major distributors who are sourced from bulk distributors like Hunt’s Point Market. Instead of this mainstream method, the people of Chinatown choose to utilize quality over quantity. Daily shopping trips replace bulk ordering, which helps to reduce their food waste overall. The markets in Chinatown are instead serviced by various small farms throughout the east coast and overseas. The relationships between the distributors and farmers are essential and most of them are from familial ties passed down through generations. These relationships help the farmers to tailor what they are growing and supply the restaurants with exactly the type of food they need. While these relationships help to reduce the food waste from Chinatown’s restaurants, the system isn’t perfect.

Around 85% of the food made in restaurants is sold and consumed. The remaining 15% is either thrown away, donated to food banks, or composted. When one considers how many restaurants there are in NYC the numbers add up. This means a large majority of the unsold food is just tossed into landfills. The food donated to food banks is extremely helpful, but not everything is accepted in traditional food banks. This is where our proposal comes in. We have decided to propose a new type of food bank that would specialize in the items traditional food banks cannot accept. This would mean we are distributing hot meals and perishable items on a regular basis to the people in need. Our proposal acts in three parts: we utilized an existing network of excess garbage trucks to transition to be collection trucks for the unsold food. Then the food would be distributed to our food bank location where it would be sorted, stored and then distributed out to our pop-up shop location in Chinatown to give out free meals to those in need.

To get an accurate idea of how much food waste we can accept and divert from the landfills, we began calling restaurants in Chinatown to understand what types of food they were ordering and how much they were not selling. Through this research we were able to understand how we can tailor our proposal to meet the needs of Chinatown’s restaurants.

We compiled the data from the three restaurants we called into this Sankey diagram to understand the food waste from unsold food every week. From these numbers we created an average we could use to determine the total food waste of restaurants in Chinatown based on their size and number of customers seen every day. This allowed us to estimate how much food we expected to be collecting per day at our new food bank and distribution locations.

This map shows all the restaurants, food banks, and homeless shelter locations in Chinatown. We have decided to situate our physical store location on an existing vacant lot in the Northern Corner of Chinatown. The pop-up shop would be located in one of the public parks in Chinatown that is fairly centrally located. Hovering over the points reveals information about them. For the restaurants, it shows the main type of food sold there as well as the amount of expected food waste we would be collecting from them on a daily basis. Hovering over one of the proposed locations will show the proposed truck pickup route.

Our initial goal was to see how we could reduce the amount of food that was wasted simply be being unsold in restaurants or not accepted by food banks. This food is usually perfectly good but would instead be transported to landfills where it serves no value to the community. Our final Sankey diagram explains how our proposal helps to significantly reduce the amount of food that would otherwise end up in landfills. The food is now repurposed to food banks and distributed to various consumption methods instead of going to the landfill. Overall, we can expect to collect around 3,513lbs of food per day from the various restaurants in Chinatown. Over the course of a year this amounts to 1.28 million lbs of food. As we previously mentioned, around 85% of food is consumed. This would mean we are saving 1 millions lbs of food every year from the landfill. We would still be sending around 280,000 lbs of food to compost, but this is significantly better than the alternative.