Before I continue with more strategies, I want to reiterate that there will not be one easy solution to manage all food waste in all its forms, and it will take a combination of technologies and strategies because food waste includes everything from wastewater to misshapen fruits and unbought vegetables to industrial frying oil. Valorization of food waste falls under three main categories: One, the conversion of food waste into repurposed non-food biological products. This would include converting used frying oil into vegetable oil biodiesel to fuel your car. The second is food recovery and salvage which would be if a grocery store were to donate unsold produce to a soup kitchen to use. And the third is waste management through speeding up the process of decomposing. Here are more strategies of bio-transforming food waste!
Biofermentation-produced fertilizer
Using soil microbes, food waste can be converted into biofertilizers in a process called microbial fermentation. Microbes convert macromolecules from food waste into forms which can be used by plant, as biofertilizers. For example, phosphate and nitrogen are important for plant growth, but plants are limited in their ability to extract them from the environment, and need microbes to help them absorb these nutrients. One example is the fungus Penicillium bilaii, which allows plants to absorb phosphates from the soil by producing an organic acid which dissolves soil phosphates into a form which plants can use. A biofertilizer is made from this organism by applying seeds with the fungus (which is called inoculation), or by applying the fertilizer directly into the ground. In fact, you can do your own microbial fermentation at home! If you combine leftover fermented starch water and milk in a container, it will produce lactic acid bacteria. If you let it sit in a plastic bucket for a month, it will anaerobically ferment, and you can separate the remaining organic material from the nutrient-rich water and use it for growing plants.
Upcycling food
Basically any uneaten, unexpired, yet still discarded food is perhaps the easiest form of food waste that can be used. Upcycled food is becoming more and more mainstream, especially with a lot of nonprofits and companies such as reFed that are finding ways to rescue, redistribute, and reinvent upcycled foods. Right now, there are 64 companies devoted to upcycling food which is good because just in the US alone, about 52 million tons of unwanted or unused food ends up in landfills annually.
In conclusion, food waste management is critical to reducing our carbon footprint, and although there are many established strategies, like composting and incineration, the modern industrialization of food production requires more extensive and widespread waste management. Globally, there has been a rise in startups, nonprofits, and other companies developing new technologies to convert waste into energy and other biomaterial on a larger scale. And while there are many companies and startups still developing these strategies and making products, people can do their part by partaking in easy ways, from composting to fermenting their own nutrient-rich water to upcycling their unused food, there are many ways to manage our own food waste on an individual level.
