The Yorkshire and Humber region has one of the UK’s largest concentrations of munchies manufacturers, with over 3,000 munchies companies. Food waste, however, is really a major global issue and it’s estimated than a third of all food produced globally is wasted.
Researchers have found that 300,000 tonnes of food manufacturing waste is discarded in Yorkshire along with the Humber each and every year, most of which could be used to lead to the sustainable manufacturing of any a number of products.
In the latest report, led by BioVale in partnership with the University of York’s?Management School?and University subsidiary, the Biorenewable Development Centre (BDC) and Anthesis Ltd, researchers demonstrate that there are various of chance to take advantage of the waste materials, called biowaste, in order to develop other products using more environmentally sustainable processes.
The new project mapped the region’s food manufacturing waste then suggested a variety of ways to increase value to many of the most extremely plentiful waste products. Some examples are using poultry feathers as being a origin of compounds with the cosmetics industry and going to egg shell waste to cut out chemical toxins from water, in addition to using carrot waste as a food source colourant.
Professor Peter Ball, on the University of York’s?Management School, said: “This project has never only mapped the region’s food manufacturing waste streams but also used a desk study as well as innovation workshop with businesses, researchers and industry to identify quite possibly the most promising opportunities for creating value from waste.”
The BDC, one example is, is presently making use of GSK to get a sustainable method to obtain glucose, one of many key components useful to manufacture pharmaceutical products. The teams identified that starchy by-products from bread and potato may very well be used like a more sustainable and economically beneficial starting material and they are now exploring methods of scale-up the process for replacements in commercial production.
Dr Maggie Smallwood, CEO of BioVale, said: “The sheer amount of unavoidable food waste being generated, with all the innovation capability in your universities and firms to find new methods of extract value made by this waste provides a major new economic potential for this particular region.
“We are suffering from an exceptional interactive map on the region’s food manufacturing waste streams that can help to kick-start collaborations between food manufacturers with unavoidable waste and technology providers who could use that waste to produce useful products.”
The project partners to the food waste mapping project are actually handling companies and academics to produce new information collaborations and projects around creating value in the region’s biowaste.
