Minimizing the Impact of Food Waste Through the Integration of Green Nanotechnology and Data-Driven Approaches Book in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • Food waste includes organic-rich resources that were contaminated, discharged, lost, or degraded due to improper storage conditions, poor management of food stocks, and overproduction of products with short shelf life. Over the last decades, food waste has resulted in serious environmental and economic consequences, causing important rises in the emission of greenhouse gases and losses of billions of dollars per annum. Currently, food waste is also related to the deficit of freshwater levels, cropland, landfill volume, and fertilizers in agricultural sectors. Green nanotechnology is an active research field where nanostructured objects are being synthesized from food waste products such as rice straw, grape seeds, eggshells, and coconut coir, and then, applicated to prevent the contamination of soils and water by drugs and pollutants or mitigate the incidence of phytopathogens in crops of international interest. It is known that the performance of green synthesized nanostructures depends upon their physical, chemical, and optical features, which are parameters that can be manipulated through experimental conditions. However, their influence can be predicted through the integration of data-driven approaches to efficiently design nanomaterials with the capacity to exerted desired bioactivities. This chapter describes the use of green nanotechnology as an alternative to reduce the impact of food waste and its usefulness in developing next-generation materials with applications in food packaging and agriculture. Based on the experience of our research group, it also provides the importance of spectroscopy and microscopy characterization techniques of biologically active nanomaterials. © 2025 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

publication date

  • January 1, 2025