"We've achieved such good working relationships with Tartu's Coop stores, who don't even throw their food away anymore – they give it to us instead," Ilves said in a video call while dropping off food at one of several Foodsharing Tartu-maintained community fridge and cupboards dotted around the city. "So the trash can situation in Tartu isn't even that bad anymore."

While she couldn't disclose which stores, she acknowledged that it does still happen that the trash cans at some stores will essentially be filled to the brim, mostly with fresh produce. Info about this happening reaches them when someone happens to walk by, sees it and lets them know about it.

"But we still occasionally go and check out trash cans ourselves too, precisely just to see what the situation is in the trash," the food rescue group chief explained. "But we just can't rescue as much food from the trash [as we used to]. If we see something, then of course we'll rescue it and bring it to a cupboard."

Looking around Tuesday night, Ilves discovered that all eight trash cans at one store were completely empty, with new liners already put in.

At another store, organic waste had been sorted very neatly, with all salads and breads removed from their packaging.

"From a food rescuer's perspective, this is actually a bad practice, because now I can't rescue anything anymore," she said. "But from a legal standpoint, this is of course the right thing to do."

Ilves noted that things have gotten better in that only products that haven't held up or were damaged in transport are being discarded.

"It's no longer the case that we're finding perfectly good items in the trash," she confirmed.

'Nothing wrong' with a lot of discarded food

Even so, she had still found something to rescue – standing at the community cupboard in the morning, Ilves pulled a bunch of brown-spotted bananas out of her bag.

"There's absolutely nothing wrong with bananas like this," she said, noting that the dark spots just indicate some bruising. "Bananas are always quick to disappear from the community cupboard."

According to the Foodsharing Tartu chief, the city's community fridge and cupboards get a lot of traffic.

"I'm surrounded by people who value food," Ilves confirmed.

"What I'd love is if everyone thought this way," she added. "That when they have food at home that's about to go bad, they don't just think, 'I don't feel like using them to make anything,' but make it into something in order to save the food instead."

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