Organic waste utilization and urban food waste composting strategies in China - A review

Food loss may occur in production, storage, transport, and processing, which are the stages of the value chain with the lowest returns. The current searching was done by the keywords in main indexing systems including PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, and Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science as well as the search engine of Google Scholar. The most important points challenging areas that represent opportunities for stakeholders to look into in China are, put in place suitable economic incentives to encourage restaurants to get more involved in the formal system, create a comprehensive regulation system to benefit all relevant stakeholders by clearly defining their respective roles and responsibilities, which is necessary for the proper functioning of the whole system. In China, the most important regulations, policies and plans are regulations on safety issues of food waste treatment, detailed countermeasures on organizing, educating, supervising, and inspecting the work on food waste reduction in China, and detailed plant for household waste collection and treatment, issued by Chinese government, state council, and ministry of environmental protection. Setting national goals, awareness-raising campaigns, strict and appropriate regulation, stakeholder engagement, biorefinery and food waste recycling to animal feed are important strategies for better waste management. The most important food waste management practices in China are source separation, animal feed, rendering, composting, co-digestion, anaerobic digestion, incineration, landfill, and etc. Understanding social factors influencing household behavior is utmost importance; public education and specific communication highly contribute to improve recycling.