Sustainable solutions for food waste – from farm to fork

The immense challenge of feeding the world’s growing population with a shrinking pool of natural resources is made even more complex by inefficiency and waste across the food supply chain. Research at RIT is focused on creating innovative technologies, business models, policy initiatives, and consumer engagement efforts to reduce the amount and environmental impacts of food waste while at the same time creating economic growth and maximizing efficient use of resources. This research is funded by the National Science Foundation Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems program and engages faculty and students from six RIT colleges and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Broader impacts of this research include community engagement, K-12 education, mentorship for emerging scholars, industry partnerships, and broader communication of research findings.

Key publications:

• Trabold, T., & Babbitt, C. W. (Eds.). (2018). Sustainable food waste-to-energy systems. Academic Press.
• Win, Shwe S. and Ebner, Jacqueline H. and Brownell, Sarah A. and Pagano, Susan S. and Cruz-Diloné, Pedro and Trabold, Thomas A.. "Anaerobic digestion of black solider fly larvae (BSFL) biomass as part of an integrated biorefinery," Renewable Energy, v.127, 2018. doi:10.1016/j.renene.2018.04.093  
• Armington, WA and Chen, RB. "What to Do with All This Food? Examining the Emerging Food Waste Hauling Network in Western New York State," Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting, 2018. Citation details 
• Armington, William R. and Chen, Roger B.. "Household food waste collection: Building service networks through neighborhood expansion," Waste Management, v.77, 2018. doi:10.1016/j.wasman.2018.04.012  
• Chua, M. Does "Affordance" Mean "Thing-inform"?: Case Studies in Seeing Engineer-ing Meaning Differently Through the Process of Technical ASL Vocabulary.