Repurposing by-products from food production
Challenge: What solutions could help companies use food production by-products more efficiently and sustainably?
Food processing plants still leave a significant amount of by-products, which are discarded as waste or used very inefficiently. For companies this means additional costs for waste disposal. However, most of the by-products can be reused and returned to the value chain. This would allow companies to implement the full circle of the circular economy and to re-use as many by-products of their activities as possible.
For example, companies are currently facing the problem that oil and juice pulp, as well as various by-products of dairy production, are re-used only as animal feed (in the best scenario). This way of re-using these by-products is both environmentally and economically unsustainable. The goal of this challenge is to discover a food by-product (not necessarily mentioned above) that is currently not being re-used or is re-used inefficiently and to suggest an efficient way to re-use it.