Second draft: Are Tomorrow’s Materials Hiding in Today’s Waste?

Food waste is often seen as a waste management issue, however, it can be explored as a potential resource for sustainable material innovation. Food and agricultural waste contain cellulose, starch, fibres, proteins, and lipids that can be transformed into useful products such as packaging, textiles, insulation, bioplastics, and construction materials (Julia Matthes, Markus Schmid, 2024). This shift in perspective matters because food waste contributes around 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions (UNEP, 2021). This creates a dual environmental opportunity: reducing emissions linked to organic waste while also decreasing dependence on fossil-based, and extraction-intensive materials.

Although promising material applications made from food waste already exist, many remain limited to pilot projects (Mesa, J.A. et al., 2024), suggesting that the challenge extends beyond technical feasibility and also involves economic, regulatory, and social barriers. My poster therefore explores how food waste can be transformed into environmentally friendly materials at scale, and what role policy, start-up ecosystems, open knowledge, and public communication play in enabling or limiting this transformation. Examples such as mycelium packaging, banana and pineapple fibre textiles, and bioplastics made from orange peel, coffee grounds, seaweed, and algae suggest that this transition is already underway (Taneja et al., 2023).

I am particularly interested in how innovation can move from experimentation to wider implementation. To investigate this, I first focus on materials science, examining pathways such as packaging biopolymers, agricultural fibre composites, mycelium-based materials, and algae-derived products, drawing on Matthes and Schmid (2024), Taneja et al. (2023), and Aziz et al. (2022). Secondly, I address policy and funding, including the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, regulatory uncertainty around biomaterials, and the financial bottlenecks that keep many start-ups at the pilot stage. Finally, I explore public communication and normalisation, asking how social-media may reduce scepticism towards waste-based products through visibility.

In summary, the poster will present the view that food waste should be seen not only as something to be thrown away, but also as a valuable resource whose wider application will depend on innovation, policy support, accessible knowledge, and public acceptance.