Food waste and bio-economy: A scenario for the Italian tomato market

Food wastes display a great potential for waste-based biorefineries in the frame of a bio-economy system. The bio-economy is an innovative economy model based on the sustainable use of renewable resources in agriculture and industry, and that takes in account biodiversity and environmental protection. To this aim, some key factors are need: the development of new technologies and processes, the identification of renewable feedstock not in competition with other production chains, the creation of new markets and competitiveness, the pushing of policymakers and stakeholders to work more closely together. Tomato industry, that is one of the most important sector of the world food industry, can display an enormous potential since it produces huge amounts of wastes. Such residues negatively impact on the sustainability of food industry, since their disposal represents one main issue in terms of environmental and economic impact. Nevertheless, they represent a cheap and renewable biomass that, in the frame of the biorefinery model, could be exploited for the production of chemicals and energy thus contributing to the sustainability of this production chain. In this paper the potentiality of the tomato-wastes biorefinery was investigated with particular regard to the Italian scenario. Some main aspects were investigated including the possible re-use strategies and the available examples of tomato wastes conversion into marketable products. The analysis of the state of the art showed that tomato wastes recycling in Italy is till limited. Indeed, the scalability of such processes at an industrial scale still remains to be assessed in order to open the way to new markets based on the exploitation of tomato wastes.