Samarthia Thankappan

Food waste as a valuable resource for the production of chemicals, materials and fuels. Current situation and global perspective

Increasing demand for fuels and chemicals, driven by factors including over-population, the threat of global warming and the scarcity of fossil resources, strains our resource system and necessitates the development of sustainable and innovative strategies for the chemical industry. Our society is currently experiencing constraints imposed by our resource system, which drives industry to increase its overall efficiency by improving existing processes or finding new uses for waste. Food supply chain waste emerged as a resource with a significant potential to be employed as a raw material for the production of fuels and chemicals given the abundant volumes globally generated, its contained diversity of functionalised chemical components and the opportunity to be utilised for higher value applications. The present manuscript is aimed to provide a general overview of the current and most innovative uses of food supply chain waste, providing a range of worldwide case-studies from around the globe. These studies will focus on examples illustrating the use of citrus peel, waste cooking oil and cashew shell nut liquid in countries such as China, the UK, Tanzania, Spain, Greece or Morocco. This work emphasises 2nd generation food waste valorisation and re-use strategies for the production of higher value and marketable products rather than conventional food waste processing (incineration for energy recovery, feed or composting) while highlighting issues linked to the use of food waste as a sustainable raw material. The influence of food regulations on food supply chain waste valorisation will also be addressed as well as our societys behavior towards food supply chain waste. “There was no ways of dealing with it that have not been known for thousands of years. These ways are essentially four: dumping it, burning it, converting it into something that can be used again, and minimizing the volume of material goods – future garbage – that is produced in the first place.” William Rathje on waste (1945–2012) – Director of the Tucson Garbage project.

Sustainable energy use for smallholder agriculture: a multi-objective programming approach

Smallholder agriculture has made an increasing use of subsidized mechanization and energy inputs to reduce short-term risks in semi-arid conditions in north-west India. However, geographic patterns of production and scale of mechanization are straining resources and increasing the risk of serious degradation of natural resources. In this paper, the possibility of maximizing the revenue and energy returns in the agricultural sector at village level to fulfil the food, fuel, and feed requirements of the village has been attempted. This paper describes the energy flows through four subsystems of smallholder agricultural village: crop system; non-crop land uses; livestock systems; and households in a semi-arid region in India. By employing a multi-objective programming model, changes in agricultural activities required to optimize energy use are estimated so that economic conditions and local energy utilization of the village can be improved and energy import kept to a minimum.