Abstract
Worldwide, organic waste represents one of the most significant shares in the waste management system. Within the framework of circular bioeconomy, new and cutting-edge infrastructure has been developed at the European level to turn organic waste into valuable resources. The present paper aims to provide an exhaustive comparison between the European Union and Latin America regarding organic waste valorization. To this end, an introductive analysis about the state of the art circular bioeconomy in Latin America and Caribbean countries was developed. Subsequently, a systematic literature review in the context of South and Central America was conducted to detect differences and similarities in technologies and best practices for treating biowaste. The results show that the Latin American region is home to numerous bio-based infrastructures: biogas recovery, composting facilities and bioremediation strategies. Nevertheless, a conclusive remark underlines that some social, economic and political barriers are still encountered in the region, and therefore, new and locally-based studies are of paramount importance.
Highlights
The birth of the bioeconomy, conceived as “the process of transforming life-science knowledge into new, sustainable, eco-efficient and competitive products” [1], has been the result of chance, necessity and evolution of several societies [2]
Within the aforementioned framework of bioeconomy, the present study aims to draw a comparison analysis about biowaste recovery and treatment between the European and the Latin American contexts
This section divides the papers into three main recovery groups and aims to systematically describe current practices in the Latin American region for turning biowaste into bioresources
Summary
The birth of the bioeconomy, conceived as “the process of transforming life-science knowledge into new, sustainable, eco-efficient and competitive products” [1], has been the result of chance, necessity and evolution of several societies [2]. This evolution and concern for sustainability involves anthropological issues as ethics, an increasing delimiting factor in the modern context, as already mentioned by the Romanian economist and mathematician Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen on his treatise on bioeconomic and degrowth in 1975. Only in Central America between 1990 and 2017, about 20 million hectares of forests have been lost due to changes in land use [1]
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