In the last years, Singapore has set clear targets to transition towards a circular economy. To advance on those targets, the country has introduced policies and strategies to encourage businesses and society to adopt sustainable practices. In 2019, Singapore launched a Zero Waste Master Plan, which lays out strategies for waste and resource management within the context of the circular economy. With this plan, Singapore aims to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills by 30% by 2030. And it targets food, electronics, and packaging, including plastics, as priority waste streams. This report provides an overview of Singapore’s food waste management with special emphasis on food waste valorization strategies. Through an exploratory study and conducting interviews with different stakeholders, i.e., individuals, government, businesses, research institutes, key drivers and constraints to increasing food waste valorization were identified. The report also includes the view of food waste experts on valorization strategies that can be applied in the Singaporean context.

Purpose - Leafy vegetables may get contaminated with pathogens through the use of irrigation water during open field cultivation. The main control option to prevent this contamination is the use of disinfection technologies that will reduce the pathogenic load of the irrigation water. Several technologies, either chemical or physical, are available for disinfection, which were gathered from the literature and European Union (EU) projects. The purpose of this paper is to prioritise these technologies.Design/methodology/approach - A feasibility study was performed to identify the most promising disinfection technology considering 12 different criteria. A two-tier approach was used in which the technologies were first evaluated based on three criteria: legal status, effectiveness and technology readiness level (TRL). Only the technologies that reached pre-set thresholds for these three criteria were then evaluated in the second tier.Findings - The evaluation showed that the most promising technologies after the tier-2 evaluation were ultrasound, microfiltration, ultraviolet and ozone. The study showed that the followed approach enabled prioritising disinfection technologies allowing for selecting the most promising technologies that can be tested further on a possible application during primary production to prevent possible food safety issues in leafy vegetables.Research limitations/implications - The overview is not an exhaustive list of disinfection technologies available rather only those technologies that seemed promising for application in horticulture were addressed. Some technologies may, thus, have been missed. Nevertheless, a total of 12 single and seven combined technologies were evaluated.Originality/value - This is the first study that uses a structured approach to prioritise a broad range of possible water disinfection technologies for use at primary production

Water related problems caused by climate change are threatening the future of food systems in both Netherlands and Ghana. In this paper we present the results of a comparative case study analysis. The objective is identifying similarities in the use of spatial information by experts and stakeholders in their attempts to remove the barriers or foster the enablers of NbS uptake in view of climate change. Experiences in this field have been listed in the Rhine-Scheldt Estuaries (the Netherlands) and Bono East Region (Ghana) about rainwater harvesting and reuse of wastewater. The analysis focused on identifying similarities in the use of spatial information by stakeholders in their attempts to remove the barriers or foster the enablers of NBS uptake. Both rainwater harvesting and wastewater treatment techniques are available, and ready to be accepted and applied by farmers and food processing industry. Their uptake however is hampered by multiple barriers, ranging from biophysical and technical barriers to social and institutional barriers. We conclude that spatial information can be an enabler for adoption of nature-based solutions, if the spatial information is applicable for the assessment of a wide range of possible solutions for water scarcity considering food production, either nature-based solutions or technologies. In both case studies we observe a struggle to make the future spatially explicit. In both case studies, the effect on biodiversity of respectively reuse of effluent water and RWH did not play a direct role in the stakeholder dialogue.