PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
In the EU, nearly 30% of the total food produced, around 88 million tonnes per year, is wasted throughout the entire value chain. Food manufacturers produce 19% of this food waste, which amount to around 17 million tonnes per year. In the past, it was common practice for food producers to deliver their food waste directly to farmers, but this is occurring less and less as regulation becomes more restrictive and as farmers consistent high-quality feed in order to ensure an efficient livestock production. As a result, today over 50% of food waste ends up in landfill or incineration, leading to negative environmental effects, such as CO2 emissions and increased use of water and farmland. Moreover, a significant amount of valuable secondary raw materials are not being processed into added-value products.
OBJECTIVES
The LIFE F3 project's main objective is to process on an industrial scale challenging types of former foodstuff, such as waste streams that are currently difficult to process and packaged food waste.
Specifically, the project aims to demonstrate:
An industrial scale automated unpacking line, capable of removing primary and secondary packaging (e.g. cardboard and plastic) as well as tertiary packaging (e.g. cardboard); and A novel thermal treatment of products with challenging processing characteristics e.g. syrups (high sugar content), bananas (low dry matter), pits, seeds and nuts, and frozen products first on an existing pilot scale installation and then on an industrial scale.The project focusses mainly on resource efficiency and the circular economy.
RESULTS
Expected results:
Treatment of 13 500 tonnes of packed former foodstuff: - Separation of the packaging material in three streams: cardboard, plastics, high calorific waste; - Recycling of 1 508 tonnes of cardboard and 95 tonnes of plastics, and the thermic valorisation of 2 683 tonnes of high calorific waste; and - Production of feed with less than 0.03% of packaging; Treatment of 22 000 tonnes of challengingfoodstuff: - Production of a high-quality feed corresponding to the standard feed blend; Increase of the installations total capacity by 50 000 tonnes of foodstuff per year to produce 40 000 tonnes of additional qualitative feed blend; Production of 40 000 tonnes of feed blend per year leading to savings of 6 667 ha of crops and 65.7 million m3 of water, while reducing CO2 emissions by 25 200 tonnes.
