Waste Food-Energy-Water Urban Living Lab – Mapping and Reducing Waste in the Food-Energy-Water Nexus

The project's aim is to substantially reduce resource inefficiencies in the urban food-energy-water nexus. The aim of the WASTEFEWULL project is to develop and test internationally applicable methods of identifying inefficiencies in a city-region's food-energy water nexus. We will undertake this through an international network of industry/civic society-led Urban Living Labs (ULL) in four urban regions - UK (Bristol), Netherlands (Rotterdam), South Africa (Western Cape) and Brazil (Campinas). Partners in Norway and the USA will provide economic valuations of potential impact, and impact-led public education, outreach and dissemination. Waste occurs across food, energy and water systems; at the interface of these systems, waste increases significantly the overconsumption of our limited resources: food (e.g.energy lost in food storage), energy (e.g. used to clean water) and water (e.g. nutrients lost in sewage). Resource scarcity is not only a matter of efficiency, but of access, distribution and equality. Each urban context has different pressures and opportunities. The focus of the WASTE FEW ULL project is therefore not so much on the specific down stream challenges, but on upstream processes by which cities can identify, test and scale viable and feasible solutions that reduce the most pressing inefficiencies in each context.