IFR joins food waste reduction project
A Horizon 2020 project has been launched with the aim of helping to cut food waste across Europe by 30% by 2025.
The ‘Resource Efficient Food and Drink for the Entire Supply Chain’, or REFRESH, project is receiving just under €9m in Horizon 2020 funding and also aspires to reduce waste management costs and maximise the value from unavoidable food waste and packaging materials.
The venture is co-ordinated by Stichting Dienst Landbouwkundig Onderzoek in the Netherlands and has 26 partners from 12 European countries, including the UK, France, Germany and Italy, as well as non-EU consortium members from China and Kenya.
The UK’s Institute of Food Research (IFR) will also participate in the project and will be leading work aimed at identifying key waste streams across the EU, as well as finding ways of adding value to them by turning them into other products. The work will evaluate technological feasibility, economic viability, legislative compliance and environmental sustainability through four European pilot countries as well as in China.
The IFR will also be developing a pan-European database to evaluate the composition of food waste components for nutrients, bioactives, allergens, enzymes and microbiological safety. The work also involves innovative approaches to getting value from food waste by deriving fuels and chemicals from putrescible food waste, producing new fibre-rich food ingredients from food processing co-products, and creating new animal feed products.
Professor Keith Waldron, director of the IFR’s Biorefinery Centre, said “With 100 million tonnes of food waste each year, it’s imperative that we take an EU-wide, comprehensive approach to reducing avoidable waste, and finding better uses for what can’t be avoided.”
Adding his thoughts, Paul Finglas, also of the IFR, said: “One of the key societal challenges in Horizon 2020 is sustainable food consumption with reduced waste, which this new project addresses.”
The research and innovation action project runs until 2019.
