PeriurbanWasteEng : Toward agricultural and food waste engineering in increasingly urban peri-urban areas: how to transform waste and for what uses?

Context and challenges

Food systems (agricultural production, transport, storage, processing, distribution, purchasing, consumption) generate waste at each stage and in different ways depending on the situation and territory, and involve different actors: farmers, processing professionals, associations, households, restaurant owners and caterers, and ultimately anyone who eats. The corresponding carbon footprint is estimated at more than 3 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, i.e. 6.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Goals

Reducing waste is possible “at the source”, by limiting losses and waste, but also in a logic of circularity of flows, by promoting the use of some waste as raw material for other uses. That is why our consortium wishes to explore waste engineering further by applying the logic of circularity of flows not only to reduce waste but to recover it.  A suitable scale to carry out such studies seems to be local territories, with a limited and therefore manageable scope. That is why we propose that this project be limited to Saclay plateau and Versailles plain. The question guiding the research of our network is: Toward agricultural and food waste engineering in increasingly urban peri-urban areas: how to transform waste (or not) and for what uses?

Responding to this question implies analysing the current situation and understanding the expectations of stakeholders and consumers. On this basis, we intend to explore the potential of combining two things: better recovery of waste (the idea is a domino effect rather than traditional solutions with little added value) and cutting back on waste (and therefore the associated impacts). With this in mind, it will take promoting efficient economic and ecological business models while taking into account how the system is organised (stakeholders; institutions; processes; relationships between the different components of the system; system scope, limits and interactions with the outside world).
The goals of this project are the following:

• Build a shared vision of how waste management is currently organised and what the associated territorial stakes are.An inventory of available data (via current projects, actors in the field, etc.) that offers insight into the typology of agricultural and food waste, where it is found and how it is used on the Saclay plateau and Versailles plain; A synthesis of data to quantify flows and grasp the current organisation of systems and the associated territorial stakes; An assessment of the expectations of stakeholders, including consumers, when it comes to the issue of waste management.
• Define common interdisciplinary research topics in response to these stakes, resulting in collaborative projects. To do so, we plan to organise innovative design workshops based on the KCP method, which has already proved useful in helping pinpoint original interdisciplinary topics (Brun et al. 2021)

Project sheets

Project participants

Coordination : 

• Violaine Athes-Dutour,UMR SayFood, TRANSFORM division, violaine.athes-dutour@inrae.fr
• Caroline Pénicaud UMR SayFood, TRANSFORM division, caroline.penicaud@inrae.fr

INRAE structures