The metabolism of cities

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.

Material and energy flows between town and country, questioning agri-food systems: relocation, non-food uses of biomass, opposing soil artificialisation, etc.

Our consortium wishes to investigate the engineering of agricultural and food waste in a logic of circularity of flows on the scale of a large urban area, including the Saclay plateau and the plain of Versailles. We wish to explore the issue in an interdisciplinary manner, including 7 units from 4 INRAE divisions.

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

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.

Compare and articulate a comprehensive approach to the bioeconomic transition combining field observations and modelling

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

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.