Feeding ourselves with and through the city

Feeding ourselves with and through the city

A bioeconomy that harnesses the potential of biotechnologies and economic and social sciences to reduce waste, produce food responsibly, and replace petro-sourced materials with bio-based solutions is an approach that we must consider and implement for "the city," which is both a generator of carbon emissions and a significant source of bioresources. Wasted food, water treatment, landfills, and supply chains all require us to seek and find solutions to meet the needs of a growing urban and peri-urban system while simultaneously preserving our natural resources.

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CARIBOU is an exploratory project that brings together skills in social sciences, humanities, environmental assessment and technology to help develop bread recovery sectors.

A study carried out by ADEME on food waste from collective catering establishments in France has shown that a restaurant serving 500 guests an average 200 days a year produces between 15 and 20 tonnes of waste a year, or, in budgetary terms, between 30,000 and 40,000 euros in food waste annually

Food plays a decisive role In for the flow of materials and energy ofin an urban areas.the POPCORN project, our ambition the goal is to worklook onat these two complementary dimensions: the eating population that eats and its food consumption, and the transformation of food matter, thus allowing for a more reliable quantitative analysis of the materiality of the food systems of an areaterritories by connecting agricultural production sectors to consumption and waste sectors that are often looked at in isolation.

Some insect species such as the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) can grow on a wide variety of organic substrates ranging from “noble” by-products (wheat bran) to waste such as pig slurry (Singh & Kumari, 2019). This capacity is now seen as an ecological way to recycle some biowaste.

The management and reuse of urban wastewater must go beyond the treatment of water and recycling in an industrial context or use for irrigation on farms. If wastewater is to be incorporated into urban ecosystems, the entire small water cycle needs to be redesigned, from identifying all available resources in a territory to characterising all uses and their associated constraints to all the socio-technical systems that allow water to be treated, transported, stocked and (re)distributed.

A systemic vision of the links in the production-consumption-excreta/waste chain provides a basis for reflection and discussion of appropriate enablers for the socio-ecological transformation of cities and territories.

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Understand the interactions between the activities that produce, process, value and consume biomass in a systematic rather than sectoral way, and account for the dynamics of the water, energy and land resources that underpin these activities