Waste-to-nutrition" technologies aim to transform agricultural or food waste into ingredients for human and animal consumption, while reducing the environmental impact of food systems. INRAE scientists assessed the environmental impact of 5 of these technologies in nine usage scenarios in France. They compared them with existing waste recovery technologies such as anaerobic digestion and composting. Their results, published in Nature Sustainability, show that these new technologies do not systematically provide any environmental benefits compared with existing solutions.
In other words, the new technologies (like insect farming or mycoprotein harvesting) have not caught up with the old ones (like composting or feeding food scraps to a pig or goat).
