Trend Alert: Food - Want not, Waste Not

David Taylor, Strategic Futures Analyst, Collaborative Connections

Food, which has largely been taken for granted in the developed world over the last few decades, is now a major global talking point, and not just because of the rising price of it. New technology is currently being commercialised to make sure that food which is not wanted, is no longer wasted.

What is changing?

Gordon Brown recently announced a campaign to help reduce Britain's waste food mountains as reports of food riots in the developing world, and rising food prices in the West have begun to weigh on consumer consciences and pockets. As part of this campaign, supermarkets will be urged to drop "three for two" deals on food that encourage shoppers into bulk-buying more than they need, often leading to the surpluses being thrown away. Gordon Brown postulated that "unnecessary" purchases were contributing to price rises, and urged people to plan meals in advance and store food properly.

Wasteful consumption notwithstanding, campaigners have pointed a larger finger at another culprit - the increasing use of biofuels in the world’s largest economies. According to an unpublished World Bank study, the EU and US drive towards biofuels is having a massive impact on both food supply and prices, and have caused a 75 per cent increase in food prices.

But researchers may have found a solution to the cleaner energy, cheaper food conundrum by using two kinds of bacteria to produce hydrogen from food waste. Researchers have combined the efforts of two kinds of bacteria to produce hydrogen in a bioreactor and the use of a more advanced disposal system could mean that mountains of food waste can now be turned into valuable energy in the form of "biohydrogen". Two companies, Biowaste2energy Ltd and Ineos Bio, are both looking into commercially exploiting this technology.

Why is this important?

Research into using bacteria to produce hydrogen has been revived thanks to the rising profile of energy issues, with hydrogen having three times more potential energy by weight than petrol, making it the highest energy-content fuel available. With nearly 7 million tonnes of food going to waste in the UK alone every year, a bioreactor disposal system could not only reduce the green house gases produced by landfills, but also produce the much cleaner hydrogen. According to researchers, with a more advanced pre-treatment, biohydrogen can even be produced from the waste from food-crop cultivation, such as corn stalks and husks - millions of tonnes of which are produced each year.

For the producers of hydrogen cars this may mean cheaper bio-hydrogen which could result in a massive boom in clean transport, reducing the need for biofuels, increasing the proportion of food crops and therefore bringing prices down… hypothetically. What is more certain is that diverting bio-waste from landfill into biohydrogen production addresses both climate change and energy security, and in so doing, creating a much more efficient "cradle to cradle" process.

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