Social-Ecological-Technological Solutions to Waste Reuse in Food, Energy, and Water Systems

Overview:

* Technologies to reclaim food and agricultural waste are just one part of a food (nutrients), energy, and water systems (FEWS) landscape.

* Systems approaches offer solutions that stakeholders and researchers can use to move toward more optimized FEWS.

Overarching goals:

* develop solutions to integrated FEWS science questions

* build analytical and visualization tools accessible to a broad range of users for reusing or transforming food and agricultural waste.

Research Questions:

1. How is the FEW system structured as a Social-Ecological-Technological System (SETS) landscape at the watershed scale? What are the baseline interactions between food production, waste streams, energy recapture, and water use?

2. What existing waste recovery and reuse approaches are readily available, and how can they be configured in an integrated system to recapture different waste streams for optimizing a FEWS?

3. How can interactions of waste streams, technologies, and stakeholder behaviors be modified to increase FEWS resilience under scenarios of changing climate, adoption of resource recovery technologies, demographic, and economic development?