Zero food waste city 2049: Identifying barriers to transition pathways

Abstract

Zero food waste city 2049: Identifying barriers to transition pathways Daniel Black, Ian Roderick, Adina Paytan, Sue Charlesworth and Joy Carey from an Urban Living Lab in the UK have tested newly integrated systems approaches and valuation methods to understand how to reduce the city's food waste. Food waste costs the UK billions of pounds each year and much of it is avoidable. The challenge for the WASTE FEW ULL research project was to produce and test methods for identifying inefficiencies in the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus in urban settings. Looking in particular at Bristol city, which throws away 48,000 tonnes of food waste each year, the team looked into how they could transform Bristol into a sustainable food city. Stakeholder concerns arose including the nutrient overload problem in water systems and the economic recovery of phosphate; the large amount of food waste from the city linked to food security issues; the energy and carbon footprint of the digestate produced from the anaerobic digestors; the economic challenges of reducing food waste; the plastic contamination of waste streams; sewage system blockages; and the difficulties of recycling sewage and wastewater. This research looks at the challenge of phosphorous recapture from sewage through extensive discussions agreed to shift the project focus to residential food waste reduction and processing (and the associated plastic contamination). The team eventually began looking at the critical concept of resilience and economic efficiency, working to substantially reduce inefficiencies in a city-regions FEW nexuses.