REFLY

With approximately 1/3 of the world's food being lost or wasted each year, with environmental, economic, and social costs estimated at nearly €2.4 billion, it is urgent, in addition to limiting losses and promoting reuse, to explore innovative circular bioeconomy approaches to recycle nutrients and address the challenges of food security and sustainability. Recent work shows the value of the black soldier fly, Hermetia illucens (MSN), whose larvae can develop on a wide range of organic substrates, to convert biowaste into animal feed, fertilizers, or biofuels. After a dynamic period, marked by decisive regulatory changes that allowed new companies to produce insects on standardized and nutrient substrates (cereal by-products, agri-food co-products) or, more rarely, on plant biowaste, the sector's growth is currently experiencing a significant slowdown. This is mainly due to intense competition with other established sectors for substrate use. To revive its momentum, the sector must quickly shift to new substrates; the exploitation of biowaste that is abundant, available, nutritionally appropriate, and unused by competing sectors undoubtedly constitutes the most promising avenue. However, EU regulatory restrictions currently limit the range of sources that can be used for rearing MSN larvae. The objective of REFLY is to assess the benefits and risks of insect-based bioconversion by MSN larvae, of the most promising unauthorized food biowaste in order to provide public authorities and companies in the "biowaste" and "insect" sectors with objective data to reconsider, or, conversely, maintain, current regulatory restrictions. The results obtained should make it possible to specify the potential exploitation of each deposit studied, and provide recommendations for achieving this. To achieve these objectives, the first phase of REFLY will be devoted to defining, using multiple criteria, the unauthorised biowaste to be prioritized, collecting it, and converting it into insect products that could potentially be used in the animal feed, biofuel, or fertilizer markets. The second phase of the project will consist of analyzing the resulting products to enable an objective assessment of 1/ their biological (prion), microbiological (pathogenic microorganisms), and chemical (micropollutants, toxic newly formed compounds, microplastics) safety, 2/ their nutritional quality (macro- and micronutrients), 3/ their acceptability to consumers and industry stakeholders, and 4/ their economic profitability. The third phase of the project will involve conducting a multi-criteria, multi-stakeholder benefit-risk analysis for each type of unauthorized biowaste studied. Recent automatic text analysis methods will be explored to analyse the large volume of data generated by scientific monitoring on the subject and integrate them into the benefit-risk analysis of several scenarios studied by REFLY. This analysis, based on various criteria (health, nutritional, sociological, economic, regulatory, etc.) and various stakeholders (research, industry, public authorities, consumers, etc.), will focus in particular on the amplification and mitigation effects of the benefits and risks interacting in a circular bioeconomic system. Coordinated by INRAE-QuaPA, REFLY involves a highly multidisciplinary consortium of six research units bringing together specialists in nutrition, microbiology, food toxicology, sociology, economics, and knowledge engineering.