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 2 nd 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 society's behavior towards food supply chain waste. "There was no ways of Broader contextThe valorisation of food waste is an increasingly "hot" topic, as demonstrated by the publication of several reports on the quantities of food wasted along our supply chains and the increasingly recognised need to both avoid waste and nd new renewable resources. The low efficiency of these supply chains has economical and environmental impacts, wasting resources such as water, energy, labour, land and agrochemicals. While 1 st generation waste valorisation techniques such as AD and composting have some value, the inherent chemical complexity of food waste makes it a very attractive source of higher value products. This perspective article highlights initiatives around the globe on 2 nd generation use of food supply chain waste as a resource, providing a renewable feedstock for diverse sectors of the chemical industry. The review highlights the limitations linked with the use of food waste as a resource, connecting it with social and policy issues, giving for the rst time a complete picture of the state-of-the-art in this multidisciplinary research area and in the light of recent technological advances and the drive towards using waste as a raw material to both reduce the environmental burden of disposal and the concerns about future resources.

Castor oil is increasingly becoming an important bio-based raw material for industrial applications. The oil is nonedible and can be extracted from castor seeds from the castor plant belonging to the family Euphorbiaceae. The oil is a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fatty acid esters linked to a glycerol. The presence of hydroxyl group, a double bond, carboxylic group and a long chain hydrocarbon in ricinoleic acid (a major component of the oil), offer several possibilities of transforming it into variety of materials. The oil is thus a potential alternative to petroleum-based starting chemicals for the production of materials with variety of properties. Despite this huge potential, very little has recently been reviewed on the use of castor oil as a bio-resource in the production of functional materials. This review therefore highlights the potential of castor oil in the production of these diverse materials with their projected global market potential. The review gives the background information of castor oil and its geographical availability, the properties and its uses as bio-based resource for synthesis of various materials. The review further highlights on the use of castor oil or ricinoleic acid as a green capping agent in the synthesis of nanomaterials.

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Food waste is currently generated in significant quantities worldwide. While most of this has generally few uses different from landfilling or composting, advanced valorization alternatives should be developed to maximize the value derived from such an important waste source. This contribution aims to illustrate a series of examples and current valorization strategies proposed in different countries in order to tackle the food waste issue. Proposed processing schemes involve biorefinery approaches based on both chemical and biological technologies. Important legislation aspects in different countries are also presented. © 2014 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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