People in Finnish households throw 20-25 million kilos of food away, totalling 120-160 kilos. In the Circwaste project, the Natural Resources Institute of Finland (LUKE) promotes the circular economy of the food system: reduced food waste, better utilisation of co-products and recycling of nutrients.
The project partners are seeking new solutions for preventing and reducing the amount of wasted food, for redistributing food and for increasing the use of animal parts of lesser value. LUKE also improves the efficiency of nutrient recycling using trial cultivation.
The purpose is to utilise plant co-products and promote the recycling of nutrients in manure and biogas processing. Juha-Matti Katajajuuri, senior scientist at LUKE, says circular economy thinking is a big issue, part of LUKE’s core business.
Common values
LUKE's partner in the waste food sub-project in is Arkea Oy, active in Southwest Finland. “We make food for kindergartens, schools, hospitals, workplace canteens, retirement homes and assisted living services. We have approximately 60 kitchens where we make the food ourselves, some 70 kitchen customers where we send the food but our own personnel serves it and dozens of food delivery points. We have four school kitchens and two workplace canteens in the trial,” says Paula Juvonen, head of services.
With the LUKE project, Arkea can now measure plate loss for the first time. There will be a bidding competition for vendors producing the metrics technology during the spring. The measurements themselves can be started in the autumn. Both the clients and the staff measure food loss twice in periods of four weeks.
Juvonen believes that manufacturing and catering loss can be influenced with a planned approach, while plate loss is affected by attitude. Children and the youth in particular she considers rather enlightened eaters.
“We run shared promotions with schools that teach the children to take the right amount of food on the plate. We will inform our customers regarding this project and train and motivate our staff together with LUKE. This is a shared goal,” Juvonen thanks.
Circwaste-magazine 1/2017