Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Innovations in Resource Loss Reduction, Recovery, and Reuse (InnR3) for Sustainable Food Systems

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The United States is the most efficient producer (total value of $560 billion) and top exporter ($140 billion in 2017) of food in the world. Due to population growth and economic development, it is conservatively predicted that the U.S. food industry will need to grow by at least 70% by the year 2050 to meet the needs of global population reaching 9.7 billion. This is considered a grand challenge that requires revolutionary technological advances in order to achieve sustainable food production growth while avoiding negative environmental impact. A key challenge is that a significant fraction of increasingly limited resources used for food production is lost. These losses occur through a variety of forms including bio-wastes, co-products from food processing and ethanol refining, food wastes, fertilizer runoff, and municipal and agricultural wastewaters. These losses are causing national and global crises by contributing to many interconnected problems including resource scarcity (e.g., clean water, soil nutrients), environmental pollution (e.g., excess levels of nutrients in the Gulf of Mexico), and high energy consumption (e.g., for treating bio-waste). Further, increasing climate variability may induce greater variability in nutrient fluxes and exacerbate these interconnected problems. Despite decades of efforts by the government and private agencies, the system-wide trend continues to worsen. The present practices are fragmented and do not provide an effective solution that society is ready to adopt. This Engineering Research Center (ERC) planning grant aims to develop activities that will address resource security and environmental sustainability revolution that will potentially turn these trends.University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and partners Princeton University, University of Michigan, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Virginia State University propose an Innovation in Resource loss Reduction, Recovery and Reuse (InnR3) ERC to generate a holistic, novel solution that will resolve the interconnected problems. Instead of focusing on a particular technology for a single problem, this ERC planning grant targets a convergent solution composed of a coordinated portfolio of technologies coupled with region specific policies to resolve a system of problems caused by nutrient loss. The project targets a solid work plan and a qualified team to expand the technology portfolio of interconnected problems in the entire food production (primarily in rural areas) and consumption (primarily in urban areas) cycle across spatial scales from field, farm, industry, small watersheds and large basins. Through a series of workshops and virtual meetings, this planning project will identify fundamental knowledge gaps, technology innovation barriers and institutional barriers for system level integration and adoption. These activities will also serve to identify additional needed partners through strategically organized working group discussions. This planning project will work to create a new, diverse workforce of research, education, and practice leaders for realizing InnR3 and create an interdisciplinary student-centered learning framework. Beyond the national concerns regarding degradation of the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, this ERC targets societal impacts in terms of behaviors of food producers and consumers, health of the public, environmental sustainability, economic growth and prosperity, and regional stability.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.