BMP analysis and decision tools for the comparison of different management and treatment scenarios of food waste from large retailers.

The new strategies in waste management, i.e., source-separate collection of the organic fraction and the need to reduce the biodegradable-Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) allocated in landfill, have favoured the development of composting and anaerobic digestion as useful biotechnologies for transforming organic waste into suitable agricultural products. Moreover, given that the attention to the environmental impacts is becoming all the time more important, the possibility to recover energy from waste has encouraged the spread of the anaerobic digestion processes of organic fraction of waste as way to provide a clean fuel from renewable energy. In the frame of a research project between this important supermarket chains and the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Florence (DIEF), some strategies for the waste management from food departments of the stores spread in Tuscany were compared in a life cycling perspective. In particular it was considered a reference scenario in which the Food Waste (FW) are delivered to the existing MSW treatment plants and some innovative scenarios in which waste are used for energy production in a anaerobic digestion plant dedicated and directly managed by the company.