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.

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the 'mess' of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses.

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Is it the case that more competitive SMEs have greater capacity to adopt environmental initiatives? The answer is no, according to this study which tried to link small firm environmental performance to factors such as profitability, growth, skills and research and development. This study focuses on three interrelated propositions that are concerned with the impact of environmental initiatives on firm competitiveness; the relevance of management's awareness to environment: the availability of external information and expertise to aid management, and the competitiveness of the firm. The firm's competitive strengths measured variously as above average profitability, firm growth and R&D, skills and modernity of plant and equipment, there was only scattered evidence to suggest any of these was importantly associated with the firm's environmental performance. The study showed that firms with an average economic performance were just as likely to adopt environmental initiatives as their high-performing competitors. Moreover, regardless of managers voicing personal concerns about the environment, most small firms do relatively little about the environment in practice and are reluctant to seek advice about it. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

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Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong Region are undergoing transformations because of increasing engagement in international trade, alongside economic growth, dietary change and urbanisation. Food systems approaches are often used to understand these kinds of transformation processes, with particular strengths in linking social, economic and environmental dimensions of food at multiple scales. We argue that while the food systems approach strives to provide a comprehensive understanding of food production, consumption and environmental drivers, it is less well equipped to shed light on the role of actors, knowledge and power in transformation processes and on the divergent impacts and outcomes of these processes for different actors. We suggest that an approach that uses food systems as heuristics but complements it with attention to actors, knowledge and power improves our understanding of transformations such as those underway in the Mekong Region. The key transformations in the region include the emergence of regional food markets and vertically integrated supply chains that control increasing share of the market, increase in contract farming particularly in the peripheries of the region, replacement of crops cultivated for human consumption with corn grown for animal feed. These transformations are increasingly marginalising small-scale farmers, while at the same time, many other farmers increasingly pursue non-agricultural livelihoods. Food consumption is also changing, with integrated supply chains controlling substantial part of the mass market. Our analysis highlights that theoretical innovations grounded in political economy, agrarian change, development studies and rural livelihoods can help to increase theoretical depth of inquiries to accommodate the increasingly global dimensions of food. As a result, we map out a future research agenda to unpack the dynamic food system interactions and to unveil the social, economic and environmental impacts of these rapid transformations. We identify policy and managerial implications coupled with sustainable pathways for change.