No abstract

The A2UFood project aspires to design and implement a holistic scheme for the management of food loss and waste, covering all aspects of the ‘reduce–reuse–recycle’ philosophy. An integral part of an efficient strategy to combat food wastage is raising awareness and informing the public. For this reason, among the designed direct, in person, communication activities of the A2UFood project, the ‘A2Food training kit’ has a key role. The kit includes a short theoretical background and nine sets of participatory activities, and it is the first of its kind implemented in Greece. After their evaluation through workshops, all proposed activities were included in an e-book for further use. Activities are based on the Education for Sustainable Development framework and the Sustainable Development Goals. The dissemination model employed draws on adult education theory, in the form of participatory workshops and also follows the ‘train the trainers’ principle. All the workshops are based on the principles of active learning, related to real life experience and cooperative learning. Following these principles, the activities designed for the workshops aimed to bring participants’ pre-existing experience, values, and beliefs into confrontation with a new context. Responding to COVID-19 pandemic limitations, necessary adjustments to distant training requirements were also implemented. Through the training kit, we have trained 270 trainers and, by the end of June 2021, 19 of them had implemented selected workshops for about 600 students, all over Greece. In conclusion, the multiplicative power of the kit is considered satisfactory under the given pandemic-induced social-distancing conditions, and it will have a lasting footprint alongside the informative campaign, since it will be available for use in the future, either as a tool for the training of trainers, or as material to be used by the trainers.

The degree of purity of materials recovered from municipal solid waste (MSW) depends mainly on the objective: the intended use of the recovered material and the cost to recover this material in its pure form, determined by the intensity of the effort and the technology involved. The Bio-waste to Bio-plastic (B2B) Project aims to develop an integrated separation process at the bio-waste source, focusing on Hospitality Units. The quality of the collected bio-waste will be upgraded by removing foreign bodies or even specific categories of food waste, or by adding bio-waste from other, more specialized, sources (e.g. bakery residues) to produce compostable bio-plastics through an optimal synthesis process. Compostable bio-plastics are high added value products, which justify an increase in the cost of the preceding processes. After examining the possibility of further source separation and its results, B2B will study the optimal collection and transport system which decisively affects many qualitative elements, testing and evaluating a relatively high-cost but highly effective solution, that of hand-sorting in order to optimize materials recovery. B2B will identify all the parameters of the production process of PLA monomers and (poly) lactic acid in relation to the quality characteristics of the raw material (bio-waste) collected from Hospitality Units. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of food waste (bio-waste) produced in Hospitality Units will then take place. All the above will be tested on a bench-scale unit that will allow their further study and their substantial improvement, as well as the extraction of realistic results. Finally, the effect of the end-product bio-plastic on the composting and anaerobic digestion of bio-waste will be examined. The expected results from the B2B implementation are an optimized source separation scheme for Hospitality Units, the identification of the appropriate method of upgrading the quality of residues collected for the purpose of bio-plastic production, and eventually an integrated process of converting bio-waste into a high added value product.