From January 15 to 17, the general assembly of the European ToNoWaste project will take place at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The European meeting in Vienna, organized by the Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, will be attended by the entire consortium of the project, which is coordinated by the University Jaume I in Castellón.
The mission of the project is to discover successful approaches to prevent and reduce food waste. Stakeholders in European food systems will be encouraged to make better decisions towards more sustainable food systems for food production and consumption with the help of evidence-based tools and experiences. Practical aspects will therefore be an essential element of this meeting of 21 partners.
After a well thought-out and lengthy selection process, the first portfolio of local project ideas developed so far will be presented. These will be implemented over the next few years in Valencia (Spain), Graz and Vienna (Austria), Halandri (Greece) and Hälsingland (Sweden). The local projects will take place in different contexts. Specifically, they will focus on improving the implementation of waste reduction in school kitchens, in the direct marketing of organic products in urban areas, or by training multipliers to prevent and reduce food waste in supermarkets.
At this General Assembly, the science-based evaluation framework for selected pilot projects will be transferred from theory to practice. This will ensure that all partners involved in implementing the measures in the various pilot projects can coordinate their ideas, understand each other's vocabulary, identify synergies and increase the impact of these pilot projects. The hosts, the project team at the ITA consisting of Saskia Favreuille, Freya Schulz, Ulrike Bechtold and Mahshid Sotoudeh, will evaluate and analyse the partial results and synthesize them in a report.