On November 23rd, the 3rd meeting of the Spanish Refresh Platform was held at the headquarters of CREDA-UPC-IRTA.

The progress of the Refresh project and the latest initiatives of the members of the Platform were presented, the next steps to be followed in the coming months were also discussed. We enjoyed both an interesting and entertaining program. 

 

A program full of news

In this third edition, the Platform members had the opportunity to attend at different presentations:

-In a first block, the progress of the Refresh project as a whole and the first results of the pilot projects that are being developed to prevent waste in the catering service of Fira de Barcelona and of valorisation of fishing discards in Cofradía de pescadores de Villajoyosa were reviewed.

-In a second block, after introducing the Agriculture Department of Catalonia as a new member of the Platform, the members briefly shared their latest news and initiatives. Hispacoop presented the communication campaign "Join responsible consumption. Reduce Reuse Recycle". The Plataforma Aprovechemos al Alimentos presented the results of the project "the Food Festival", after two years of being in operation. Nutrition without Borders presented the results of its two projects "Barcelona shares the food" and "Remenja'mmm". Finally, the NGO PROSALUS presented the results of its consumer survey conducted the last months in the municipality of Madrid.

- As a new section, this year a "guest artist" was invited for the first time: Hector Barco from the University of Deusto (Deusto Tech). He presented the contributions on food waste from the H2020 Waste4think project.

Sustainability throughout the event, the brand of the house

As usual in CREDA-UPC-IRTA, the meetings of the Spanish Refresh Platform always have sustainability as a transversal axis. On this occasion, the catering was in charger to a social initiative of cooking with recovered foods. Sobres Mestres delighted the participants with a meal made mostly with food recovered from Mercabarna and small businesses, in collaboration with the restaurant Imperfect, an interesting initiative for social and occupational integration through the kitchen. Finally, a visit was made to the new building of the social company Espigoladors, which was created with the aim of expanding its line of Imperfect products based on recovered foods and which will soon be fully operational.

Next steps

To close the session, the last hour was devoted to discussing the next steps of the Platform: once they reached the equator of the project and consolidated the member organizations and the internal functioning of the platform, it is proposed to give a greater impetus to the work of dissemination that is currently already underway, through the drafting of a Report on dissemination of the activities of the Platform 2016-2017.