Food and agricultural waste management is undertaken to recycling the wastes so as to reduce the ill effects of wastes on environment, health and aesthetics. The waste may be either in solid, liquid or gaseous form. The process of food and agricultural waste management varies for rural and urban areas, for municipal and industrial waste, for developed and developing nations. The management of municipal wastes is responsibility of local government while as the management of agricultural waste is the responsibility of farmers. The developed nations use various novel technologies to reduce the negative impacts of waste or use and effective management to exploit it.
The process of collection, transport, disposal, recycling and monitoring of food and agricultural wastes is called food and agricultural waste management. Food and agricultural waste management can be costly so it is important to understand the various effective, sustainable and safe means of its management. The three points ‘R s “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle have become basic tenet in food and agricultural waste management due increase in generation of wastes, increasing in processing costs and decrease in available landfill space. There should be flexibility in food and agricultural waste management systems in light of changing environmental, social and economic conditions. To optimize, evaluate, adapt and define food and agricultural waste management systems, the information and feedback can be obtained from system analysis.
Presently, world population are increasing day by day which creating a huge amount of food and agricultural waste which ends up in landfills, also can be re-purposed. The United Kingdom was the first country to introduce the law for food and agricultural waste management in due to health and hygienic issues in the civil society and cities areas. After this, the concept of dust-bin has became essential part of our life.
The process of collection, transport, disposal, recycling and monitoring of agricultural waste is called food and agricultural waste management is undertaken to recycle the food and agricultural waste so as to reduce the ill effects of wastes on environment, health and aesthetics. Various techniques are used for the management of waste which includes land-filling, incineration, anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, plasma gasification, recycling, composting. Anaerobic digestion produces bio fuel in the form of biogas. Plasma gasification results in the generation of electricity from waste. Recycling of food and agricultural waste involves the collection, sorting and reprocessing of waste into new products. Vermin composting is the preferred form of composting as it results in the formation of vermin compost called black gold due to the presence of rich nutrients and growth promoting factors in it.
Due to industrialization, urbanization and increase in population density, there has been an increase in the accumulation of waste. The waste include radioactive substance, agricultural wastes, food wastes, industrial wastes, municipal wastes. Garbage and paper waste etc. There has been decrease in the availability of open land and space for disposal of waste due to intensive use of agricultural land for residential, industrial and commercial purpose. In order to reduce the load of food and agricultural wastes on earth, the collection, transport, recycling and disposal of food and agricultural wastes needs to improvised.