The EU-28’s food service sector generates excessive amounts of food waste. This notwithstanding, no comparative, cross-national research has ever been undertaken to understand how food waste is managed in restaurants across the EU-28. This study contributes to knowledge by presenting a first attempt to conduct a comparative analysis of restaurant food waste management practices in the UK and the Netherlands. It finds that although restaurateurs in both countries use demand forecasting as a prime approach to prevent food waste, forecasting does not always work. When this happens, food waste management programmes such as repurposing excess foodstuffs, redistribution of surplus food and consumer choice architecture are mostly considered commercially unviable. To improve the effectiveness of food waste management in the food service sectors of the UK and the Netherlands it is necessary to ensure that food waste mitigation becomes a corporate target for restaurateurs and the progress towards its achievement is regularly monitored by top management. This corporate commitment should be facilitated by national policy-makers, but also by EU regulators, by raising consumer awareness of food waste, incentivising surplus food redistribution and enabling food waste recycling.
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Making food packaging more sustainable is a complex process. Research has shown that specific knowledge is needed to support packaging developers to holistically improve the sustainability of packaging. Within this study we aim to provide insights in the various tradeoffs designers face with the aim to provide insights for future sustainable food packaging (re)design endeavors. The study consists of analyzing and coding 19 reports in which bachelor students worked on assignments ranging from (1) analyzing the supply chain of a food product-packaging combination to (2) redesigning a specific food packaging. We identified 6 tradeoffs: (1) Perceived Sustainability vs. Achieved Sustainability, (2) Food Waste vs. Sustainability, (3) Branding vs. Sustainability, (4) Product Visibility vs. Sustainability, (5) Costs vs. Sustainability, and (6) Use Convenience vs Sustainability. We compared the six tradeoffs with literature. Two tradeoffs can be seen as additional to topics mentioned within literature, namely product visibility and use convenience. In addition, while preventing food waste is mentioned as an important functionality of food packaging, this functionality seems to be underexposed within practice.
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The seaweed aquaculture sector, aimed at cultivation of macroalgal biomass to be converted into commercial applications, can be placed within a sustainable and circular economy framework. This bio-based sector has the potential to aid the European Union meet multiple EU Bioeconomy Strategy, EU Green Deal and Blue Growth Strategy objectives. Seaweeds play a crucial ecological role within the marine environment and provide several ecosystem services, from the take up of excess nutrients from surrounding seawater to oxygen production and potentially carbon sequestration. Sea lettuce, Ulva spp., is a green seaweed, growing wild in the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea. Sea lettuce has a high nutritional value and is a promising source for food, animal feed, cosmetics and more. Sea lettuce, when produced in controlled conditions like aquaculture, can supplement our diet with healthy and safe proteins, fibres and vitamins. However, at this moment, Sea lettuce is hardly exploited as resource because of its unfamiliarity but also lack of knowledge about its growth cycle, its interaction with microbiota and eventually, possible applications. Even, it is unknown which Ulva species are available for aquaculture (algaculture) and how these species can contribute to a sustainable aquaculture biomass production. The AQULVA project aims to investigate which Ulva species are available in the North Sea and Wadden Sea which can be utilised in onshore aquaculture production. Modern genomic, microbiomic and metabolomic profiling techniques alongside ecophysiological production research must reveal suitable Ulva selections with high nutritional value for sustainable onshore biomass production. Selected Ulva spp lines will be used for production of healthy and safe foods, anti-aging cosmetics and added value animal feed supplements for dairy farming. This applied research is in cooperation with a network of SME’s, Research Institutes and Universities of Applied Science and is liaised with EU initiatives like the EU-COST action “SeaWheat”.
Cross-Re-Tour supports European tourism SME while implementing digital and circular economy innovations. The three year project promotes uptake and replication by tourism SMEs of tools and solutions developed in other sectors, to mainstream green and circular tourism business operations.At the start of the project existing knowledge-gaps of tourism SMEs will be researched through online dialogues. This will be followed by a market scan, an overview of existing state of the art solutions to digital and green constraints in other economic sectors, which may be applied to tourism SME business operations: water, energy, food, plastic, transport and furniture /equipment. The scan identifies best practices from other sectors related to nudging of clients towards sustainable behaviour and nudging of staff on how to best engage with new tourism market segments.The next stage of the project relates to two design processes: an online diagnostic tool that allows for measuring and assessing (160) SME’s potential to adapt existing solutions in digital and green challenges, developed in other economic sectors. Next to this, a knowledge hub, addresses knowledge constraints and proposes solutions, business advisory services, training activities to SMEs participating. The hub acts as a matchmaker, bringing together 160 tourism SMEs searching for solutions, with suppliers of existing solutions developed in other sectors. The next key activity is a cross-domain open innovation programme, that will provide 80 tourism SMEs with financial support (up to EUR 30K). Examples of partnerships could be: a hotel and a supplier of refurbished matrasses for hospitals; a restaurant and a supplier of food rejected by supermarkets, a dance event organiser and a supplier of refurbished water bottles operating in the cruise industry, etc.The 80 cross-domain partnerships will be supported through the knowledge hub and their business innovation advisors. The goal is to develop a variety of innovative partnerships to assure that examples in all operational levels of tourism SMEs.The innovation projects shall be presented during a show-and-share event, combined with an investors’ pitch. The diagnostic tool, market scan, knowledge hub, as well as the show and share offer excellent opportunities to communicate results and possible impact of open innovation processes to a wider international audience of destination stakeholders and non-tourism partners. Societal issueSupporting the implementation of digital and circular economy solutions in tourism SMEs is key for its transition towards sustainable low-impact industry and society. Benefit for societySolutions are already developed in other sectors but the cross-over towards tourism is not happening. The project bridges this gap.
Met de opkomst van digitale diensten en de impact van digitale technologie is het vraagstuk van privacy hoog op de maatschappelijke agenda beland. Burgers gebruiken steeds vaker apps en andere online services, met als keerzijde dat we steeds meer informatie over onszelf moeten delen om optimaal gebruik te kunnen maken van deze faciliteiten. Dit kan leiden tot schending van onze privacy. Ook voor de meeste (mkb-)bedrijven is het lastig om inzicht te krijgen in de privacy implicaties van hun online services en in de privacy-eisen om deze implicaties te verzachten. Het privacyvraagstuk is voor deze doelgroepen grijpbaar te maken door de privacy-eisen waar online diensten aan moeten voldoen op een beknopte, overzichtelijke en duidelijke manier te communiceren. Privacy labels, in navolging van energielabels en voedingslabels, zijn hiervoor een veelbelovende methode. Binnen het, door NWO gefinancierde, SERIOUS project is een prototype ontwikkeld om privacy-eisen te visualiseren middels een multidimensionaal privacy label (Barth, Ionita en Hartel, 2020). Op basis van een vragenlijst met betrekking op datacollectie, dataverwerking en datadisseminatie kan de mate van privacy borging en bescherming worden vastgesteld. Het huidige prototype van dit privacy label is generiek. Echter is het mogelijk dat bepaalde elementen van privacy in de praktijk binnen sommige domeinen veel zwaarder wegen dan binnen anderen. Kenniscentrum Creating 010 onderzoekt, naar aanleiding van de vraag vanuit de samenwerkingspartijen van het SERIOUS project, binnen dit project hoe het SERIOUS prototype kan worden doorontwikkeld naar een volwaardig privacy label. Hierbij wordt nagegaan of en hoe het prototype in en voor verschillende sectoren werkt, deze zijn: retail, media en cultuur. Het doel van dit project is om middels een haalbaarheidsstudie de richtlijnen voor een domein-specifiek label te achterhalen en op te stellen die dienen als uitgangspunt voor een vervolgproject voor een domein-specifieke privacy tool.
