Food at the Tipping Point: Ways Forward from a Food System in Crisis
Biomaterials: The Future of Food Packaging and Single-Use Plastics
Lettuce in a bag, plastic wrapped mushrooms, yogurt containers, berries in plastic clamshells. Food production is tied to the use and disposal of single-use plastics, but could biomaterials be a sustainable alternative? How do we, as consumers, discern what is truly compostable from what could end up polluting our soils?
On Thursday, February 23 join experts Love-Ese Chile, the Owner and Managing Director at Regenerative Waste Labs, and Amanda Johnson, the UBC researcher behind Grasstic as they take a deep dive into the innovations and challenges around biomaterials — and the role that they might play in revolutionizing our food system.
This webinar will feature a speaker discussion followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. Registration is free.
View all 10 events in the series here!
Love-Ese Chile – Regenerative Waste Labs
Dr. Love-Ese Chile is Owner and Managing Director of the circular economy research consulting firm, Regenerative Waste Labs. She is a sustainable material researcher with eight years of experience developing circular bioeconomy-based solutions that recover value-added products from organic waste. In her work, Love-Ese advises businesses on circular product design, closed loop recovery strategies and how to communicate the value of circular products. She leads a technical team of researchers who develop novel waste management and circular recovery technologies.
Amanda Johnson – UBC Wood Science
Amanda Johnson is a nature-loving materials scientist working to create a plastic alternative from agricultural waste. She calls the product she developed, “Grasstic” – a biomaterial made from the residual stalks of grass crops like corn or wheat. Johnson spent many hours in the field as a soybean breeder before coming to the UBC Faculty of Forestry to do her PhD. She is a UBC Sustainability Scholar, a Public Scholar, and winner of the UBC Bioproducts Institute’s Rising Star Award. She hosted a show about food, farming, and sustainability on Vancouver Co-op Radio. When not in the lab, she enjoys adventuring with her partner and two young kids.
Anubhav Pratap-Singh (Moderator) – UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems
Dr. Pratap-Singh holds the BC Ministry of Agriculture Foods and Fisheries Endowed Professorship in Food and Beverage Innovation at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, UBC Vancouver. With more than 100 publications in peer reviewed journals, Dr. Pratap-Singh is well known for cutting-edge application-oriented research on developing novel technologies for specific applications for non-thermal pasteurization, better delivery of food-derived bio active compounds, plant-based meat alternatives development, and sustainable packaging and upcycling of food products. Dr. Pratap-Singh is leading the academic planning behind the under-construction UBC Food and Beverage Innovation Center.
The Food at the Tipping Point: Ways Forward from a Food System in Crisis series is brought to you by the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems (CSFS), the BC Food Web, the Faculty of Land and Food Systems (LFS), and the Royal Bank of Canada. This 10-part speaker series addresses the urgent need for widespread, dramatic change and provides us inspiration and real solutions.
