Top Curr Chem (Z) (2018) 376:3
2 years include topics such as sustainable agriculture, climate change mitigation and adaptation, water scarcity and support of subsistence rural practices, and fisheries and forestry [3, 4]. The challenges related to this demanding context can be intensi- fied and better understood when taking into account that the world population is expected to increase by about 30% over the next 35 years, reaching more than 9.5 billion people in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100 [5]. As pointed out by Xia et al. [6], the global food waste of approximately 1.3 bil- lion tons per year is shocking in this context and, although it should be avoided or minimized, it cannot be completely prevented nowadays. Primary and secondary processing generates unpreventable food supply chain waste. This can be due to a number of factors along the supply chain, differing by the commodity and country in question. In general terms, developing countries such as some African countries suffer the greatest loss during the early, upstream part of the primary processing, corresponding to 75% of food losses during production and postharvest. Various ini- tiatives, e.g., building better infrastructure through knowledge transfer (more effi- cient storage and transport technologies) and improving collaboration and market opportunities in the food supply chain could have a positive role. In industrialized countries, waste occurs especially in the consumption stage, accounting for 50% of overall loss of crops in some countries of North America, Europe, and Oceania. In this case, together with educational and cultural actions, other aspects such as developing legislation to make date labels more user-friendly for consumers (sell-by, best-before, and consume-by), redesigning packaging characteristics (avoiding the “buy 1 get 2” offers) and retailer marketing strategies should be considered [7]. It is estimated that around 140 billion tons of biomass from the agricultural sec- tor are generated every year in the world [8, 9], and a considerable part is recog- nized as waste and not conflicting with food availability, e.g., leaves, roots, stalks, bark, bagasse, straw residues, seeds, wood and animal residues. Using alternative strategies to avoid additional losses and produce several high value-added chemicals could minimize the volume of non-renewable materials used today (i.e., roughly 50 billion tons of fossil fuels), enough to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on non-sustainable resources. Therefore, considering their available vol- ume and practically low costs locally and globally, associated to rich function, struc- ture and chemical heterogeneity, all agro-industrial waste should also be considered for their chemical and material potential, as well as a source of energy [10–13]. An important proposal related to waste hierarchy as a framework for residue man- agement can be seen in Fig. 2 [14, 15], which was reformulated to include agro- industrial waste. In this case, the agro-industrial waste hierarchy has a different meaning from top to bottom, since all biomass is valued as raw material. ‘Preven- tion’ is an intrinsic part of optimized processes, avoiding overproduction. There- fore, the least probable option is ‘disposal’ as the supply chain is designed to attend sustainable consumption, using all bio-based material generated. Here, sustainable production also includes eco-efficiency, cleaner and green productivity, whereas sustainable consumption allows greener choices to be made by individuals based on eco-procurement, supply chain management, waste minimization, recycling, and resource efficiency measures. Both sustainable production and consumption comprises ‘life-cycle thinking’, aiming at preventing problems shifting from one
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