49,325 research outputs found

    The role of packaging in minimising food waste in the supply chain of the future

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    This report focuses on packaging opportunities that may help to reduce or recover food waste, proposes opportunities for industry to address food waste through innovative and sustainable primary, secondary and tertiary packaging. Food security is an emerging challenge for policy makers and companies in the food supply chain. The global population is expected to grow to 9 billion and demand for food by 77% by 2050. Over the same period food production will be under threat from climate change, competing land uses, erosion and diminishing supplies of clean water. One of the solutions to this dilemma is increased efficiency and waste reduction in the food supply chain. This report focuses on packaging opportunities that may help to reduce or recover food waste. Packaging has a vital role to play in containing and protecting food as it moves through the supply chain to the consumer. It already reduces food waste in transport and storage, and innovations in packaging materials, design and labelling provide new opportunities to improve efficiencies. Product protection needs to be the primary goal for packaging sustainability, and sometimes this requires trade-offs between packaging and food waste. The report draws on an international literature review and interviews with representatives from 15 organisations in the Australian food and packaging supply chain. It considers food waste along the entire food supply chain, but with a particular emphasis on food waste that occurs prior to consumption, i.e. during agriculture production, post-harvest handling and storage of raw materials, and in the commercial and industrial (C&I) sector consisting of food manufacturing, wholesale trade, food retail and distribution and food services. Food rescue through charities is also a focus of the report. Over 4.2 million tonnes of food waste is disposed to landfill in Australia each year. Around 1.5 million tonnes of this is from the commercial and industrial sector (the focus of this report), costing around $10.5 billion in waste disposal charges and lost product. The largest single contributor in the commercial and industrial sector is food service activities (e.g., cafes, restaurants, fast food outlets), which generate 661,000 tonnes of food waste per year, followed by food manufacturing (312,000 tonnes) and food retail (179,000 tonnes). Most waste in food manufacturing is unavoidable, and almost 90% is already recovered as animal feed, compost or energy

    Predicting Intermediate Storage Performance for Workflow Applications

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    Configuring a storage system to better serve an application is a challenging task complicated by a multidimensional, discrete configuration space and the high cost of space exploration (e.g., by running the application with different storage configurations). To enable selecting the best configuration in a reasonable time, we design an end-to-end performance prediction mechanism that estimates the turn-around time of an application using storage system under a given configuration. This approach focuses on a generic object-based storage system design, supports exploring the impact of optimizations targeting workflow applications (e.g., various data placement schemes) in addition to other, more traditional, configuration knobs (e.g., stripe size or replication level), and models the system operation at data-chunk and control message level. This paper presents our experience to date with designing and using this prediction mechanism. We evaluate this mechanism using micro- as well as synthetic benchmarks mimicking real workflow applications, and a real application.. A preliminary evaluation shows that we are on a good track to meet our objectives: it can scale to model a workflow application run on an entire cluster while offering an over 200x speedup factor (normalized by resource) compared to running the actual application, and can achieve, in the limited number of scenarios we study, a prediction accuracy that enables identifying the best storage system configuration

    Piggybacking on an Autonomous Hauler: Business Models Enabling a System-of-Systems Approach to Mapping an Underground Mine

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    With ever-increasing productivity targets in mining operations, there is a growing interest in mining automation. In future mines, remote-controlled and autonomous haulers will operate underground guided by LiDAR sensors. We envision reusing LiDAR measurements to maintain accurate mine maps that would contribute to both safety and productivity. Extrapolating from a pilot project on reliable wireless communication in Boliden's Kankberg mine, we propose establishing a system-of-systems (SoS) with LIDAR-equipped haulers and existing mapping solutions as constituent systems. SoS requirements engineering inevitably adds a political layer, as independent actors are stakeholders both on the system and SoS levels. We present four SoS scenarios representing different business models, discussing how development and operations could be distributed among Boliden and external stakeholders, e.g., the vehicle suppliers, the hauling company, and the developers of the mapping software. Based on eight key variation points, we compare the four scenarios from both technical and business perspectives. Finally, we validate our findings in a seminar with participants from the relevant stakeholders. We conclude that to determine which scenario is the most promising for Boliden, trade-offs regarding control, costs, risks, and innovation must be carefully evaluated.Comment: Preprint of industry track paper accepted for the 25th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE'17

    Chapter 5: Food Security

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    The current food system (production, transport, processing, packaging, storage, retail, consumption, loss and waste) feeds the great majority of world population and supports the livelihoods of over 1 billion people. Since 1961, food supply per capita has increased more than 30%, accompanied by greater use of nitrogen fertilisers (increase of about 800%) and water resources for irrigation (increase of more than 100%). However, an estimated 821 million people are currently undernourished, 151 million children under five are stunted, 613 million women and girls aged 15 to 49 suffer from iron deficiency, and 2 billion adults are overweight or obese. The food system is under pressure from non-climate stressors (e.g., population and income growth, demand for animal-sourced products), and from climate change. These climate and non-climate stresses are impacting the four pillars of food security (availability, access, utilisation, and stability)

    Water and Nutrition: Harmonizing actions for the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition and the United Nations Water Action Decade

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    Progress for both SDG 2 and SDG 6 has been unsatisfactory, with several indicators worsening over time, including an increase in the number of undernourished, overweight and obese people, as well as rapid increases in the number of people at risk of severe water shortages. This lack of progress is exacerbated by climate change and growing regional and global inequities in food and water security, including access to good quality diets, leading to increased violation of the human rights to water and food. Reversing these trends will require a much greater effort on the part of water, food security, and nutrition communities, including stronger performances by the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition and the United Nations International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development. To date, increased collaboration by these two landmark initiatives is lacking, as neither work program has systematically explored linkages or possibilities for joint interventions. Collaboration is especially imperative given the fundamental challenges that characterize the promotion of one priority over another. Without coordination across the water, food security, and nutrition communities, actions toward achieving SDG2 on zero hunger may contribute to further degradation of the world’s water resources and as such, further derail achievement of the UN Decade of Action on Water and SDG 6 on water and sanitation. Conversely, actions to enhance SDG 6 may well reduce progress on the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition and SDG 2. This paper reviews these challenges as part of a broader analysis of the complex web of pathways that link water, food security and nutrition outcomes. Climate change and the growing demand for water resources are also considered, given their central role in shaping future water and nutrition security. The main conclusions are presented as three recommendations focused on potential avenues to deal with the complexity of the water-nutrition nexus, and to optimize outcomes

    EU Ecolabel for food and feed products – feasibility study

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    The environmental impacts of the production and processing of food, feed and drinks make up between 20% and 30% of the total environmental impacts of consumable goods in the EU. In the case of eutrophication (the accumulation of nutrients in water causing a reduction in oxygen availability) they account for as much as 58% of the total impacts. The EU Ecolabel is a voluntary scheme that forms part of overall EU policy to encourage more sustainable consumption and production. To date, the EU Ecolabel scheme has developed criteria for products in the non-food sector. The Regulation that governs the scheme (66/2010) aims to extend the EU Ecolabel into new product categories including food. However, the Regulation stipulates that before extending to the food sector, a feasibility study should be undertaken
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