27 January 2022

The Farm-to-fork’s article published by h-ALO, mentioned the problem of food waste. Food waste can be described as the food discarded by retailers due to tone or appearance and plate waste by consumers; moreover food waste includes the half-eaten meal left on the plate at a restaurant, food scraps from a meal prepared at home and all the scraps that a family eliminates from their fridge.

Therefore, food waste is composed by food and inedible parts of food which is removed by supply chain.

@freepik

Why food waste management is important?

Tackling food waste is fundamental for a sustainable vision of the future and reducing food waste is environmentally fundamental as it keeps food out of landfills. In fact, The European Commission plans to propose a legally binding target to reduce food waste across Member States, integrating food loss and waste prevention into other EU policies.

Have this kind of waste some chances? Can food waste be recycled?

@pch.vector

The following pyramid ranks the strategies to avoid a huge quantity of food waste. It focuses, starting from the bottom, on prevention actions such as avoid surplus food generation throughout food production and consumption and the food supply chain. Then, the possibilities touch the re-use on one side for human consumption through redistribution networks and food banks (respecting safety and hygiene norms) and on the other for animal feed. In the middle of the pyramid there is the double possibility of reuse and recycle which means revalorise by products from food processing and food waste into added-value products by processes that keep the high value of the molecule bonds of the material. The second part of the pyramid is composed by the least preferable options: recycle of substances contained in food waste for low added value uses such as composting, digestate from anaerobic digestion, etc.; recovery through incineration of wastes; and finally, disposal of waste sent, for example, to landfill.

h-ALO strongly invites the reader to save the pyramid, use it as a guideline and share it for helping the development of strategies that tackle food waste.