Re-/Upcycling of food waste

Re-/Upcycling of food waste covers a wide range of innovations dealing with the reuse of waste to create new products. The newly produced items range from shoe soles made out of old chewing gum to 3D-printed cups made out of orange peel and organic plastic made out of fish waste. (Other recycled products suitable for packaging as an alternative material to the more environmentally harmful bio-based and fossil-based plastics are grouped together under a separate niche alternative packaging materials).

According to WWF, 313 kilos of edible food are disposed of in Germany every second^[1]. The Food and Agriculture Organization assumed that in 2011 around one third of the food produced worldwide was thrown away, which corresponds to 1.3 billion tons per year. ^[2] On the one hand, the re-/upcycling of food waste includes innovations that deal with the reuse of waste products in food production. On the other hand, the niche includes innovations that aim to avoid food waste, which is caused by its unsaleability.

The aforementioned innovations can be regarded as prime examples of the sustainable cascading use: "A cascading use of biomass exists, when biomass that has been processed into a bio-based final product is used at least once more, either for material or energy purposes.”^[3] A higher efficiency of biomass use is to be achieved through cascading use.^[4] This is the case, for example, with the Finnish company RENS, which produces shoes from coffee grounds. The company's declared aim is to produce sustainably and avoid the waste of valuable resources^[5].

If the waste product is not a by-product of food production, (as is the case with the above mentioned coffee ground-based shoes) but the actual final product, the aim of the projects should not be to achieve a second or third use, but to promote the first use of the food by "saving" it from the garbage can. Hereby the unsaleable food is usually transformed into another product. This way, the Swiss company Damn Good Food & Beverages AG wants to prevent "the long journey from seed to crispy loaf of bread" from being in vain by processing unsold bread into beer^[6].

As the individual approaches differ greatly from one another, the sustainability potential indicated should be understood as an average value.

While some companies work with waste products that are by-products of food production, other projects focus on food waste that could be avoided from the beginning. While these companies can alleviate the symptoms of food waste, they have no influence on its causes. The reduction of food waste can lead to a situation where the polluters feel (morally) relieved and do not take further steps to avoid the waste in the first place. According to the German recycling legislation (“Kreislaufwirtschaftsgesetz”)^[17] the avoidance of waste is preferable to the reuse and recycling of waste, in order to minimize the unnecessary use of resources.

When assessing the sustainability potential of individual projects, it is important to weigh up whether the products created from waste are substitutes that can replace the consumption of less sustainable products, or whether they are new types of goods that increase the overall consumption. Although the latter products can promote the reuse of resources, they also increase the overall demand.