Part 2:
Part 1:
Speaker: Marta Rodriguez-Illera
Food loss and waste (FLW) in metropolitan areas, generally downcycled, is still a bottleneck to achieving a circular food system. Implementation of Circularity of food is hampered because of the lack of structured frameworks using criteria to orchestrate the upcycling of food to higher-valued applications, such as food-to-food, and the divergence of goals and approaches. Based on a literature review, the presenters collected the different building blocks for evaluation and implementation of new circular opportunities for FLW valorization, intending to bring clarity to the transition to a more circular food chain. Depending on the FLW characteristics and monitoring outcomes, these opportunities range from the current downcycled pathways to upcycled applications, from which there is more potential for achieving higher sustainability goals. Based on the results of the review, the presenters will present the existing criteria, frameworks, support tools, and proposed solutions, together with missing criteria applicable to food-to-food pathways, for overcoming the barriers for integration and implementation within a metropolitan area.
Speaker: Marta Rodriguez-Illera
According to researcher Marta Rodriguez-Illera, existing frameworks for the circularity of food in urban systems need to be adjusted. The most important reason for this is that you can mitigate climate change by managing the food loss and waste in concentrated urban areas. Right now, less than two percent of nutrients in food waste are recovered out of food loss waste. To recover it we need to properly monitor it in practice.
Rodriguez-Illera states that we do have the necessary tools to recover the nutrients for food loss waste, but miss the proper “puzzle pieces” to connect them. We have tools and frameworks, data and knowledge, increasing innovation and increasing consumer awareness, to name a few.
What prevents us from having a working circular economy in which food loss waste can be utilized properly are a few things, of which the most important is that we miss a proper set of guidelines and criteria. Without proper criteria for circularity monitoring and validated assessment guidelines, this new circular economy can’t be reached.
Other things that prevent us from reaching a working circular economy are the lack of integration of stakeholders in the supply chain, stiff legal barriers and quality standards, lack of real assessment and risk analysis and lack transparency in quality criteria applicable to food.
Because of these obstacles, Rodriguez-Illera and others are looking to create a new framework for a circular food system based off of existing research and frameworks. When correcting existing frameworks it is important to take two different kind of assessment options into consideration. The first one being strict or intrinsic, which means that the focus lies on criteria like mass and value, the technological cycle and the cycle of materials.
Another assessment method is one in line with the broad sense of circularity, which takes into consideration the sustainability impact (people planet profit), technological feasibility, human health, social and legal aspects and life cycle thinking. Frameworks used to focus on lower-end application like anaerobic digestion, composting or landfill and lacked food-to food frameworks.
One of the frameworks discussed is the framework mentioned in “A Methodology for Sustainable Management of Food Waste. Waste and Biomass Vlorization” (2017) by G. Garcia-Garcia, E. Woolley, S. Rahimifard, J. Colwill, R. White and L. Needham. Their framework is called the Food Waste Management Decision Tree Concept. It looks at different characteristics based on which matchmaking can be simplified. According to the model, to recover the nutrients from food we need to know what we use the nutrients for and how we recover them. It is also important to know what waste we recover the nutrients from. Rodriguez-Illera mentions food loss waste from farms, industries, retail, households and “out-of-home” sources like restaurants. These sources of waste need to be matched with new places to use it. You can use the nutrients for food2food, food2feed, food2soil and food2materials. This means that the food waste is used in new food, to feed animals, in soil and in materials. To reach this, proper technology and reverse engineering has to be matched to this process as well.
Rodriguez-Illera’s critique on the FWMDT concept is that there should be quality criteria added to the existing criteria. These criteria are microbiological hazards and shelf life, nutritional and chemical value, environmental impact and economical and legal aspects. These criteria will be further explained in the upcoming publication by her and researchers Xuezhen Guo, Marta Rodriguez-Illera, Yujun Wei, Martijnetje Vollebregt and Wei-Shan Chen.
Food loss and waste (FLW) quantification provide the basis for city policymakers to develop intervention strategies to valorize the FLW in a city for circularity purposes. The current knowledge on the amount of FLW in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (AMA) is still quite limited. Therefore, in this research, we used the data from multiple sources (including primary data, literature data, and data from public databases) to calculate the FLW volume, the associated nutrient losses, and GHG-emission footprints of the FLW by food item category and chain stage. Based on those three key performance indicators, we identified the hotspots of the FLW in AMA, i.e., the food loss and waste streams with the large volumes, rich nutrient values to be recovered and high GHG-emission footprint to be avoided. It has been found that bread at the retail and household FLW are the hotspots based on stream volume and nutrient losses. Animal-based FLW streams are the hotspots for GHG emissions due to the high emission factors.
In 2050, cities are projected to be responsible for consuming 80 % of all food produced. While only covering 2% of the surface, cities are not only characterized by unproportionally higher resource flows, but also by larger number of economic activities, more dense and multilayered social network structures, higher levels of political power, and distinctive food-related behaviors. Therefore, a crucial pathway to push transition towards a more circular food system will be through the engagement of cities. Still, the central role of cities in sustainability transitions, generally, and in food system transitions, specifically, is largely neglected. Specifically, we argue that greater consideration should be given to the spatial dimension of circular food systems, the agency of cities on it, and the complex local, national and global interlinkages. In this presentation, we propose how we can take advantage of the agency of cities, spatial agglomeration, and cross-scale complexity to provide unprecedented momentum to materialize transitions to circularity at multiple scales.