Abstract
Almost one third of all food produced in the world currently goes to waste. One of the targets under the 'Responsible consumption and production' sustainable development goal calls for halving the per capita food waste at the consumer level as well as across the supply chain from manufacturing, storage and retail by 2030. While numerous strategies have been recommended and implemented to address this problem, major challenges remain to be overcome. The paper presents an in-depth review of current state-of-art practices in food waste management. The solutions and recommendations presented to reduce food waste at the household, retail, restaurant, manufacturing and supply chain levels are reviewed. Regulations and regional variations in food waste management practices are also examined. The findings are used to identify research gaps and propose a conceptual framework to increase closed-loop material flow for more circular food systems that can reduce food waste. Potential areas for application of engineering and management principles to develop analytical models for food waste reduction are also discussed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1791-1798 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Procedia Manufacturing |
| Volume | 51 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2020 |
| Event | 30th International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing, FAIM 2021 - Athens, Greece Duration: Jun 15 2021 → Jun 18 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The total lifecycle perspective to food (and other) products was introduced earlier in this paper. Adopting a total lifecycle approach will emphasize prevention and elimination of food waste from not just one lifecycle stage but across the entire lifecycle. The lifecycle perspective is also promoted by the Circular Economy concepts that is targeted at moving from a linear economy to a more regenerative and restorative economy. However, through a systematic review of literature authors of [41] posit that most studies on food waste inadequately focus only on some or a few of the stages of this lifecycle. Therefore, further research to examine the food waste problem from a more holistic perspective is needed. This insight is also supported by a study on food in cities carried out by the European Commission [35].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the FAIM 2021.
Keywords
- Circular economy
- Food waste management
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Artificial Intelligence
- Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
