Two pilot projects are making great progress under the project REAL, funded by the European Commission.

1) Mobile App for reducing food waste

Lookie Waste, the mobile-based application focuses on food consumption to monitor food waste and food packaging waste generated at the consumer level in daily life. It assesses the impact of food and packaging waste by calculating CO2eq emissions over its life cycle, from resource extraction to disposal, and proposes appropriate alternatives for the management of food waste. Also, impact of food waste is communicated in the form of the number of children affected through the nutrients lost by our food waste. The application also covers the financial impact consumers have on food waste that communicates with consumers and encourages them to reduce food waste and raise environmental awareness. Moreover, data will be collected through this monitoring application to reveal the food waste rate.

The project aims to measure and contribute to preventing the environmental impacts of food waste over the life cycle through the following outcomes. The ultimate goal is the significant reduction of food waste and packaging from household and public. The research team is currently collecting the data for food consumption at the consumer level and has started with the development process of the application.

The application is planned to be released in June 2018.

2) Application of life cycle thinking approach for enhancing the fruits and vegetables supply chain: A pilot study from Nagaland, India

The study based in the district of Dimapur in Nagaland, India is using life-cycle based information tools and methodologies to identify hotspots where interventions can be made for improving sustainability along the fruits and vegetables supply chain. The pilot aims to provide enabling conditions for promoting better sustainable consumption choices and is being carried out in two categories of local fruits and vegetables: produce from conventional farms and produce from organic farms. Possible intervention points were identified after extensive hotspot analyses and are currently being implemented for four groups of stakeholders, i.e. farmer, wholesaler, retailer and consumer.