Turning fruit and vegetable waste from the wholesale market into feed

A large amount of food lost and wasted ends its ‘life’ with high nutritive elements in it, leading to the squandering of economic, social and environmental resources. Compared to the other food waste categories fruit and vegetable waste (FVW) have a high wastage rate given by their highly perishable nature. The proposal to reallocate FVW into animal feed contribute to the sustainability of livestock production, reducing the impact of feed production for land use. In the assessment of this opportunity, the nutrients composition need to be considered because affected by vegetables seasonal variation. Therefore, to use FVW as a feed component, one of the key aspects to evaluate is the FVW nutritional composition throughout the year. In this study, it has been considered the FVW from the General Wholesale Market of the city of Milan, the largest in Italy, where the fruit and vegetables are sold to retailers. They market more than 1.000.000 tons/year of which about 1.500 tons of unsold products become waste. In the waste- collecting site, samples of each wasted fruit and vegetables were collected monthly in proportion to their amount wasted. Each sample was weighed, cut manually and thoroughly mixed. The FVW samples were analysed for their chemical and nutrients composition. Data were analysed using the GLM procedure of SAS (version 9.4; SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC). On average the FVW dry matter (DM) was 11.4±1.4%; on DM basis the NDF was 24.0±4.8%, the water-soluble carbohydrates were 33.0±7.5% and the total phenolics were 2.6±0.9%. Although differences in the nutrients composition were found across the year, the results highlighted the significant nutritional value of FVW from the wholesale market and the need for developing appropriate technologies (i.e. heath treatment to reduce the moisture) and safety evaluations, necessary to use FVW as source of feed nutrients.