Food Share - Food Waste Management System

Abstract

Food is a basic human need and from the past people used many techniques to satisfy this need. Earlier, human beings engaged in agriculture and were self-sufficient with this need. But due to globalization and industrial revolution, people focused more on industries and certain part of the society had to depend on people who engage in agriculture to fulfil their food need. That’s why in any economy in the world, agriculture or food production plays a main role. From harvesting to cooking, food items undergo a big supply chain and wastages are a common problem. But this waste is a critical number according to FAO (fao.org) and due to this many other resources that support the food supply chain are also wasted parallelly. These wasted foods will then cause environmental pollution if efficient waste management practices are not practiced. These food waste are the biggest contributors to solid waste that cause many short term and long term environmental and health problems When we come Sri Lanka, Food waste is common thing which is experienced from households up to large scale hotels. At the same time governing bodies face another major problem of managing solid waste since Sri Lanka practise open dumping since it is cheap and suitable lands are hard to find since the size of the country is very small. Therefore, a new method is needed to manage solid waste and also to minimize generation of food waste which is the highest contributor for solid waste that are dumped. Throughout the world, different countries practice different techniques to fight the food waste and solid waste generation. Out of those, using a platform to share excess food items have become popular in the recent past since the community that can be engaged for this is comparatively higher and the final impact is also higher when compared with other techniques. Currently in Sri Lanka, no such application is available but all the required environment is available. Therefore, this project aims to develop a platform to share excess food among local community using a mobile application with the motive of problem.