Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone Project / The paper revolves around the intersection of food waste and food insecurity within the built environment. A sample of grocery stores were asked to explain their policies regarding food waste, specifically how they divided this waste stream between food recovery and composting. It was determined in the end that the potential to grow composting as a waste management practice is far greater than the potential to expand food recovery, for all the participating grocery stores could not donate more food than they had historically.

<p>Environment and sustainable development are very current topics in today's society, both</p><p>national and international. The government's bill 2004/05:150 ”Swedish environment objectives - a common commission” contains several environmental quality objectives, that in turn is divided up in smaller secondary objectives. One of the secondary objectives says: “Latest year 2010 shall at least 35% of the food waste from households, restaurants, largescale kitchens and shops be recycled through biological treatment. The objective intends source separated food wastes to composting at home as central treatment”.</p><p>The aim with the project is to investigate which initiatives are required in order for Halmstads municipality to achieve the secondary objective concerning 35% recycling of food wastes. During the sorting of household combustible waste in Halmstads municipality today, there is no sorting of food waste. This means that only food waste from restaurants and large-scale kitchens are collected for further biological treatment. Systems for handling waste are</p><p>complex and many factors play a part when choosing the most favourable collection system for each municipality.</p><p>An inventory shows that recycling of 5500 tons of food waste is required in order to fulfil the secondary objective. There are several different solutions to collect this amount. My proposal is to use a two vessel system in households, restaurants and large-scale kitchens. This means that the waste is separated into two different containers. The waste will be sorted into sealed plastic vessels of which one is for biological waste, and the other for combustible. In order to keep the two vessels a part, two different colours could be used. For example, a brown vessel for biological waste and a green one for combustible. The households should also be able to use home composting as a complement. At restaurants and large-scale kitchens there should be the possibility to an alternative collection through a garbage disposal unit with a container. When the vessels are emptied, the combustible waste goes to incineration and the food waste is taken to a biogas facility.</p>

According to the statistics of ¡§Annual Report of Environment Protection in Taiwan, the Republic of China¡¨ published by the Executive Yuan, the percentage of food waste and organic garbage amount to about 20-30% of ordinary family garbage, where the food waste is about 10-15% of ordinary family garbage.To recycle the wastes, an effective method of collecting and processing food waste in order to achieve the goal of garbage reduction depends on the cooperation of civilians. The food waste collected will be processed through composting, hog-feeding, or anaerobic decomposition. The composting treatment can be divided into anaerobic and aerobic methods. Aerobic composting process is to make use of turning, forced blowing or suction of air in order to supply oxygen. Major process is based on aerobic decomposition to cause the stabilization of organic material. As the reaction speed is fast, the processing time can be drastically reduced and is thus called ¡§high-speed composting process¡¨. Presently there are already many researches in the method of processing food waste that could complete composting products within the shortest time. The result of this study shows if the collection, transportation, treatment, and recycling processes can be properly planned and promoted, the civilians tend to cooperate and the amount of waste recycling can be significantly increased. In addition, by controlling living condition of fungi including moisture content, temperature, PH value, and volatile solid through evaluating primers of superior fungi, the investigation of the food waste processing efficiency and its influence shows there is a trend of significant reduction in the amount of volatile solid material with time.This indicates the phenomena of food waste being decomposed by fungi. The estimation of decomposing speed for food waste is in the range of 2.08¡Ñ10-4 ~ 1.00¡Ñ10-2 kg/hr and the average speed is 2.87¡Ñ10-3 kg of food waste per hr-kg of fungi. The efficiency of treatment is about 50% of the result of original Japanese plants.

Thesis (M. Journ.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35-36).

Environment and sustainable development are very current topics in today's society, both national and international. The government's bill 2004/05:150 ”Swedish environment objectives - a common commission” contains several environmental quality objectives, that in turn is divided up in smaller secondary objectives. One of the secondary objectives says: “Latest year 2010 shall at least 35% of the food waste from households, restaurants, largescale kitchens and shops be recycled through biological treatment. The objective intends source separated food wastes to composting at home as central treatment”. The aim with the project is to investigate which initiatives are required in order for Halmstads municipality to achieve the secondary objective concerning 35% recycling of food wastes. During the sorting of household combustible waste in Halmstads municipality today, there is no sorting of food waste. This means that only food waste from restaurants and large-scale kitchens are collected for further biological treatment. Systems for handling waste are complex and many factors play a part when choosing the most favourable collection system for each municipality. An inventory shows that recycling of 5500 tons of food waste is required in order to fulfil the secondary objective. There are several different solutions to collect this amount. My proposal is to use a two vessel system in households, restaurants and large-scale kitchens. This means that the waste is separated into two different containers. The waste will be sorted into sealed plastic vessels of which one is for biological waste, and the other for combustible. In order to keep the two vessels a part, two different colours could be used. For example, a brown vessel for biological waste and a green one for combustible. The households should also be able to use home composting as a complement. At restaurants and large-scale kitchens there should be the possibility to an alternative collection through a garbage disposal unit with a container. When the vessels are emptied, the combustible waste goes to incineration and the food waste is taken to a biogas facility.

Thesis (M.Journ.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35-36). Also available in print.

Title: Food waste from grocery stores in Umeå- the potential for taking care of and reducing the amount of food waste. Author: Helene Myhrberg Abstract Food waste from grocery stores is an increasing problem in Sweden, and amounts to roughly 67 000 ton per year. This has consequences both for sustainability in general, but also for achieving the targets stipulated by the EU. Given this, it should be relevant for the society that grocery stores both decrease the amount of food waste but also develop better ways of dealing with food waste. Although there exist methods for this, the practicability of such measures are unknown. In this thesis I assess these issues by conducting interviews with owners and employees at five grocery stores in Umeå, asking them how they think about these questions. In particular, I focus on how to take care of and prepare food waste for anaerobic digestion and how to decrease volumes of food waste. In essence, I find that both the knowledge of, and interest in, these issues vary substantially between grocery stores. Further, for these measures to be feasible, it requires the process to be both economically efficient while not requiring too much time of work. With this in mind, it seems necessary to have a facility that can take care of both packed and unpackaged food waste, making it as cheap and simple as possible for the grocery stores. For reducing volumes of waste, most grocery stores agrees on better planning as the way to go. Key words: food waste, grocery stores, anaerobic digestion, decreasing of food waste.

The success of a food waste collection programme depends on the participation of citizens in the correct separation and collection of food waste. Municipalities have an important role in increasing the management of resources in the food chain and from the 1st of January 2021 it is mandatory for the municipalities in Sweden to provide a system for collecting food waste from households. In Kiruna, Sweden’s most northern municipality, the expansion of food waste collection is underway. To find out what attitude and behaviour citizens have around food waste collection; a survey was sent out to 300 households in the central part of Kiruna. This report investigates the role of information, attitudes, and incentives, on household’s participation in the food waste collection programme. A statistical analysis was made to find out if there was any difference in how well the food waste is sorted depending on whether the households have their own container or common container for food waste. The results show that the majority always sorts their food waste and that the respondents generally have a positive attitude. The respondents feel that the information has been enough for them to have the knowledge to sort properly. Environmental reasons, knowledge, storage space,” because you should” and information were the most important incentives for respondents to sort their food waste. Several comments revealed an uncertainty about the environmental benefits of the collected food waste. There is potential to improve information and increase knowledge to reduce uncertainty and increase motivations and positive attitudes.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-109).

Annually, approximately 150 million metric tonnes of food goes to waste in the U.S., potentially causing economic loss and environmental pollution. Fermentation of food waste to produce acetone, butanol and ethanol (ABE) via fermentation has the potential to valorize food waste by producing value-added chemicals. However, the composition of food wastes from different sources vary, which affects ABE fermentation performance and hinders the commercialization of food waste fermentation. The objective of this study is to investigate the compositional variation of food waste collected weekly for 16 weeks (a total of sixteen samples) and determine how this variation affects ABE fermentation performance. Samples collected from Southgate Center, a food processing facility operated by Virginia Tech Dining Services, was characterized for use as a feedstock for ABE fermentation. Water, sugar, starch, fiber, protein, fat and ash concentrations in each of food waste samples were determined. ABE fermentation of these wastes was performed using Clostridium beijerinckii via batch fermentations. Correlations of ABE and butanol yields with the individual components of food waste composition were performed to better understand which components are key to ABE fermentation. Overall, this study demonstrated the feasibility of using food waste as a viable feedstock for ABE fermentation and investigated the effect of variation of food waste composition on the ABE fermentation performance. In the 16 collected samples, each major compositional attribute exhibited high variability. The concentration of total soluble sugar, defined as glucose, fructose, sucrose for the purposes of this experiment, ranged from 0.5 to 53.5% (dry basis) among different food waste samples. The concentration ranges of total starch, neutral detergent fiber (NDF), crude protein, crude fat and ash were 0 to 23.4% (dry basis), 0.6 to 25.8%, 5.5 to 21.2%, 0.1 to 37.9%, 1.4 to 13.7%, respectively. The high variation of food waste composition resulted in a high variation of ABE yield when these food wastes were subjected to fermentation by C. beijerinckii. The total ABE concentration following fermentation ranged between 6.9 to 17.0 g/L with an average value of 13.2 g/L. ABE and butanol concentrations are positively correlated with starch and equivalent glucose, i.e., the sum of initial free glucose and glucose that could be theoretically hydrolyzed from starch and sucrose during fermentation, but is negatively correlated with NDF concentrations. / Master of Science in Life Sciences / Nearly 40% of food in the U.S. goes to waste, causing a huge amount of economic loss and environmental pollution. Use of microorganisms to ferment food waste is a viable way to mitigate many of the issues associated with food waste. Put simply, fermentation is a biological process in which an organic substrate, such as food waste, is consumed and a more valuable product is produced. In this study, different food wastes were collected from the campus food processing center weekly for 16 weeks. Water, sugars, starch, fiber, protein, fat and ash contents of the collected food wastes were determined. Fermentation of these food wastes were conducted using a microorganism called Clostridium beijerinckii. The results showed that there was a high variation amongst the composition of the food waste samples. The concentration of total soluble sugar (glucose, fructose, sucrose) ranged from 0.5 to 53.5% (dry basis) among different food waste samples. The concentration ranges of total starch, neutral detergent fiber (NDF), crude protein, crude fat and ash were 0 to 23.4% (dry basis), 0.6 to 25.8%, 5.5 to 21.2%, 0.1 to 37.9%, 1.4 to 13.7%, respectively. The variation of food waste composition also led to different fermentation yields. It was also found that a higher glucose content in food waste results in a higher fermentation product yield; however, a higher fiber content in food waste results in a lower fermentation product yield.