Food packed in ordinary plastic and cling film only remains edible for a few days in storage. The poor shelf-life of packed foods means extra costs, especially for catering kitchens that produce high volumes of food for different customers.

What can a restaurant do when there is food left over from the lunch service? It can use apps such as the ResQ Club service. The service has been specifically developed to promote the use of surplus food from restaurants and to reduce food waste. Customers can browse leftover items through a smartphone app or internet browser. For example, unsold lunches can be purchased at approximately half price after lunch hour, typically 40-60 % cheaper than the original price.

Waste as a resource not a problem

• By giving waste to another company, automotive company saves about € 6 000 annually
• Win-win relationship turns waste from one company into a resource for another

Magna Automotive CZ Ltd. is a Czech subsidiary of Canadian company Magna which manufactures seat covers for the automotive industry.

Waste from the company's cutting facility is a mixture of textiles, paper, and plastic foils. Every year, it produces around 300 tonnes of this waste, which previously ended in landfill.

The average consumption for EU member countries is 128 litres per inhabitant per day and most of it turns into wastewater.

Remanufacturing is the process of returning a product or component to a state of quality equivalent or superior to that of the original product. After the product is discarded by its user and picked up by the remanufacturer, a diagnosis establishes if the product is suitable for a remanufacturing process. Next, after the disassembly, a thorough inspection is done of each component. Damaged pieces are repaired, and parts that are operational but could fail in the short term are repaired or replaced.

Currently, discarded products are often considered as ‘waste’, while in the best cases, some parts are recovered or the product is recycled to recover materials. A circular economy model closes the production cycle to optimise the use of resources and minimise the generation of waste. In this model there is a recovery hierarchy; first, the complete product is recovered, then its parts and the materials, and, finally, the embedded energy is recovered. Landfill disposal is the last option since it does not recover any resources.

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