Sustainable Synergy: Balancing Food, Energy, and Water for Improving Sustainability

The 2030 sustainability goals provide a framework for urgent action towards environmental conservation, efficient resource utilization, and industrial sustainable growth.
Food process sustainability is intricately linked with the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, forming a critical junction where resource management and environmental impact converge. The FEW nexus is a concept that highlights the interconnected relationship between food, energy, and water systems on which food processes heavily rely. These three essential resources are interdependent, where water and energy are required for safe food production, and water and food waste can be used to produce energy.

In pursuit of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, understanding and managing the interactions within the FEW nexus is crucial for addressing global challenges related to sustainability across all stages, encompassing cultivation, processing, packaging, transportation of raw materials and finished products, and recycling.

Innovative sustainable management and processing practices that optimize resource usage and minimize waste not only enhance operational efficiency in food production but also contribute to the creation of environmentally friendly and high-quality food products, ensuring the long-term viability of food systems. With these actions the sustainable development goals 9 and 12 can be accomplished helping to build resilient infrastructures, fostering innovation, and ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns.

We welcome contributions exploring topics of interest including but not limited to the following:

- Life Cycle Assessment: Considering Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to evaluate the environmental impacts of products throughout their life cycle, from production to disposal, considering scenarios to minimize the environmental footprint of food processing and supply chain operations from cradle to grave.

- Water-Energy Nexus Optimization: Evaluating and implementing feasible integrated management practices that simultaneously balance raw materials, water and energy demands, using processing simulation software in combination with environmental and/or economic evaluations.

- Renewable Energy Integration: Transition to renewable energy sources within food industry operations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels to improve sustainability.

- Waste minimization and valorisation: Implementing efficient waste management practices to minimize and valorise wastes and by-products generated by the food and beverage industries, including organic waste, wastewater, and packaging materials.

- Design of bio-refinery procedures: Maximizing the recovery of a wider range of resources from industrial agri-food by-products using the most appropriate novel technologies to be applied individually or in a cascade approach. The identification of the application of the different recovered fractions, including biofuel production, would support the shift towards renewable energy sources further supporting the transferability of novel processes to an industrial environment.

This holistic approach can make a significant contribution to effectively analyse many alternative processing scenarios including the integration of corrective measures to improve the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of the food and beverage industries, leading to substantial conservation of intellectual and economic resources.

This Research Topic seeks to gather top-notch research in these topics encompassing original articles, comprehensive reviews, mini reviews, short communications.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Sustainable Food Processing, Life Cycle Assessment, Biorefinery, Waste Management, Waste Valorization, Renewable Energy., Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.