Abstract
Food waste (FW) represents one of the greatest concerns facing mankind today; thus, the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development establishes that it must be halved by 2030. European Union legislators have taken part in this debate by publishing Directive 2018/851 to monitor the FW reduction goals, according to the waste hierarchical pyramid approach. At present, there are several proposed FW hierarchical pyramids, but these do not regard the associations between the level of waste-tackling strategies and social innovation (SI) models. Thus, the paper aims to build a hierarchical pyramid that considers, for each step of the food-supply chain and each level of the pyramid, all the FW social innovation models. A qualitative analysis of academic studies, institutional documents, and specific projects has been conducted. The results confirm the gap in the scientific literature and the lack of a systematic classification of SI activities to reduce FW. Furthermore, current SI practices are actually more focused on the human reuse of FW than on prevention, whereas SI models based on prevention might return the FWL issue to its systematic dimension. This information will help policymakers to reconsider the structural causes of FW inside the agro-food system, and not only its final consequences.
Highlights
Food waste (FW) is currently one of main issues for human beings in terms of its ethical and social impact; this impact is linked to the unmet nutritional needs of societies, leading to food poverty, food insecurity, and hunger [1,2,3]
Each social innovation (SI) initiative is represented by a black dot at the intersection between the line corresponding to its strategy for tackling FW from prevention to disposal, and the line corresponding to the food supply chain (FSC) phase where it intervenes to save:
The surplus food (SF), FW, and food loss (FL) definitions used by Teigiserova et al, 2020, are recalled here in a social perspective where “FW is defined as SF that is not used for feeding people” [48], while “FL only refers to the streams that are truly lost, whether because [they are] not accounted for or disappearing from the accounting” [41]
Summary
Food waste (FW) is currently one of main issues for human beings in terms of its ethical and social impact; this impact is linked to the unmet nutritional needs of societies, leading to food poverty, food insecurity, and hunger [1,2,3]. FW has a significant economic and environmental impact due to the excessive consumption of natural resources and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that occur throughout the food supply chain (FSC) [4,5]. In this context, in September 2015, the United Nations (UN) launched the Agenda 2030, which includes the establishment of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) in order to achieve economic growth, social integration, and environmental protection [6]. SDG 12 intends to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns,” with target 12.3 referring to the reduction in FW by 50%, which would allow a decrease of 20 to 30% of the total food-sourced GHGs [7].
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