Food Wastes: Opportunities, Risks, Environmental Impact and Perspectives

Dear Colleagues,

Recovering food wastes to recycle them into renewable resources represents a tool of global interest with both economic and environmental impacts. Food wastes can be employed as low-cost raw materials in the food and pharmaceutical industries (e.g., for the production of fertilizers or the extraction of single-cell proteins for animal feed), or used to produce biomaterials and biofuels, among others. In the last decade, several strategies of recovery have been developed. However, a very important aspect of the application of food wastes and their by-products is the possible associated toxicological risks due to the presence of environmental pollutants (inorganic and organic contaminants) and new emerging contaminants (microplastics, nanomaterials, drugs, etc.): with their high environmental persistence and poor degradability, these could be responsible for serious harm to humans, animals, and the ecosystem. New strategies have been proposed, such as eco-friendly solid waste treatment and bioremediation, using bacterial biomasses, algae, plants, etc. This Special Issue is intended for contributions concerning methodologies, research, knowledge, and ecotoxicological approaches relating to the treatment of food wastes and their by-products, as well as experimental schemes of industrial applications for their safe and effective employment, in order to reduce their environmental impact and guarantee human and animal health.

We are pleased to invite contributors from both academia and education, and welcome all types of manuscripts, original articles, short communications, and high-quality reviews from different disciplines and research areas (such as toxicology, food chemistry, analytical chemistry, fermentation chemistry, ecology, physics, etc.). 

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Clara Naccari
Dr. Nicola Cicero
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• food wastes
• contaminants
• toxicological risk
• bioremediation
• sustainability
• environmental health
• pollution control