A majority of the people do not think about the food scraps they dispose of. But scientists from the Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo have devised a new technique to decrease food waste by recycling disposed vegetable and fruit scraps into strong construction materials.
The amount of household and industrial food waste generated across the world is about hundreds of billions of pounds per year, a huge proportion of which includes edible scraps, such as vegetable and fruit peels. This unsustainable practice is not just expensive but also environmentally unfriendly. Scientists have, therefore, been looking for new ways to recycle such organic materials into useful products.
“Our goal was to use seaweed and common food scraps to construct materials that were at least as strong as concrete. But since we were using edible food waste, we were also interested in determining whether the recycling process impacted the flavor of the original materials,” said Yuya Sakai, Study Senior Author, Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo.
The team borrowed a ‘heat pressing’ concept typically used to create construction materials from wood powder. However, they used vacuum-dried, pulverized food scraps, like cabbage leaves, seaweed and pumpkin, orange, banana and onion peels as the constituent powders.