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Fruit and vegetable waste
Summary
Instead of letting your fruit and veggie scraps rot in landfills (where they release methane, a potent greenhouse gas), this research review shows how they can be turned into nutrient-rich fertilizer for growing more food. That said, the scientists caution that these homemade fertilizers need better safety testing—checking for contaminants like microplastics, heavy metals, and harmful germs—before we can be confident they're truly safe for widespread use on the crops we eat.
Fruit and vegetable waste (FVW) is a highly perishable fraction of global food loss and waste. When unmanaged, its high moisture and rapid biodegradability accelerate decomposition, odor, and leachate, and promote anaerobic methane emissions while dumping recoverable nutrients and organic matter. Valorizing FVW into nutrient-rich biofertilizers offers a practical circular-economy route that couples waste stabilization with soil fertility enhancement. This chapter reviews FVW feedstock characteristics and explains how source, segregation, moisture and C:N management, and preprocessing govern conversion performance. Major biological pathways—aerobic composting, vermicomposting, fermentation-based liquid fertilizers, anaerobic digestion, and hybrid trains—are compared in terms of stabilization efficiency, nutrient retention, scalability, and hygiene. A decision-oriented quality framework is presented. It emphasizes pH, electrical conductivity, C:N ratio, NPK content, maturity and stability indices, germination-based phytotoxicity tests, and contaminant risks (plastics/microplastics, heavy metals, and pathogens). Agronomic evidence is synthesized to link product form and application method (soil incorporation, top-dressing, fertigation) with crop response and soil-health outcomes. Techno-economic constraints and adoption barriers are summarized; priority research gaps are identified, particularly long-term field validation and standardized QA. Standardized frameworks and field trials are prioritized for adoption. Future work should integrate nutrient-release kinetics, life-cycle impacts, and farmer-friendly dosing guidance across diverse soils and climates.