Food Waste: Practices, Management and Challenges

An increased demand for recycling has prompted the food industry to become more efficient in its handling of waste. Food waste is among the priority streams for waste prevention worldwide, as it is generated at large quantities at all levels of the food production and consumption chain, in both developed and developing countries, throughout the year. This book discusses practices, management and challenges of food waste. The first chapter discusses current agricultural development systems. Chapter Two presents a review of the works of research that have been developed in the last decade on the use of food wastes as sources of antioxidant compounds, such as polyphenols. Chapter Three provides a critical overview on the studies that deal specifically with food applications, mainly focusing on their potential as sources of fibers and associated phenolics and respective antioxidant activity. Chapter Four contributes to innovation in research on the valorization techniques that have been developed for the use of food wastes as well as examines future directions in the field. Chapter Five reviews conventional methods currently applied in Vietnam for treatment of food waste, and then proposes a promising solution using anaerobic digestion technology. Chapter Six provides an overview of the generation of food waste within households in Greece and investigates the potential for prevention. Chapter Seven investigates heat generation and oxygen levels during the storage of soy sauce squeezing residue and fish meal, by-products of soy sauce and fish production and processing, respectively, by thermal analysis and gas chromatography. The final chapter discusses sugarcane bagasse hemicellulose properties, extraction technologies and xylooligosaccharides production.