Towards a more circular system
Welcome to the Upcycling Community
Worldwide one third of food produced every year (1.3 billion tonnes) is lost or wasted. Food waste has a global carbon footprint of about 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans.
Waste occurs along the entire supply chain from farms to processing and manufacturing to shops, restaurants and at home. The first step is nearly always reduction, the smaller the waste streams the better. Next, new technologies, markets and collaborations can help farmers, producers, and retailers find innovative ways to repurpose their waste streams.
Foodvalley NL takes initiative
Increasingly, small scale operations seeking to repurpose waste streams have been cropping up. This offers encouragement that circular agrifood business models are gaining traction. However, the scale is still quite small, and many barriers exist. In particular, the high implementation costs are too much for individual stakeholders to bare alone. Although awareness for waste stream upcycling is growing, it remains uncharted territory resulting in general uncertainty and lack of commitment on the way forward. Also, conservative markets with traditional supply chains are unwilling to alter established, highly profitable methods based on cheap, though often unsustainable, raw resources. Foodvalley NL is currently exploring ways to accelerate the uptake of waste streams in food production.
The recently created Upcycling Community of the Foodvalley network is a great resource to meet with other pioneers in the Upcycling movement, across the whole food value chain, and collaborate to find solutions to the barriers linked to change from linear to circular design.
Eve Martinet-Bareau – IFF The biggest roadblock we have is to ensure that we make new agreements with each other throughout the food value chain, based on what is best for the world, for the people who live in it and based on complete openness. Most of the necessary innovations are social innovation. Don’t forget SMEs, these entrepreneurs change and adapt very easily
Sebastiaan Hetterschijt – Bakkersgrondstof