24. Achieving Sustainability by Retrofitting Circular Economy Models in Food Waste Flow of Bangladesh

Given the dire state of the planet where scarce resources are being exhausted and “waste” is carelessly disposed of, we can find a hero within the concept of the circular economy—a model which aims to achieve a closed loop scenario by recycling the wastes back into the useful economic and ecological flows. Bangladesh, despite her growing population, lacks a dependable institutional waste management system, so the government should apply the concept of circular economy to modify and reconstruct it into a sustainable model. Organic food waste is the major constituent of household waste, containing nutrients and chemicals with too great of an influence on the chemical cycle to simply be disposed of. The current primary waste disposal method followed in Bangladesh is undesirable landfill dumping and such an easily recyclable component like food waste must not follow that path and should be re-circulated back into the loop instead. Currently, there are no comprehensive studies on food waste in Bangladesh to be used for policy guidance. Hence, proper quantification with composition of food wastes is essential to determine the reprocessing potential and provide policy guidance to restructure the existing inefficient waste management system into a sustainable one within the purview of circular economy concept. This chapter attempts to quantify the food waste generation of Bangladesh and explores the various options of available modern technology and methods to recover and reuse food waste. Circularity is the perfect instrument to promote decoupling and achieve sustainability, so its prospect and significance in food waste recycling shall be investigated.