The promotion of ALEHOOP through communication and dissemination activities is really important. The work we are carrying out, by valorizing macroalgal residual biomass and legume processing by-products in the search of new protein value chains, needs to be known by the scientific community as well as by any interested person. And these last months some of our colleagues did their best by attending several interesting events addressing various topics.
We already talked to you about the cool video that the European Commission’s initiative #SHEULEads recorded of our colleague Hitika Shah and you can read our post about it clicking here. But, soon after the release of this video, she also participated in an event promoted by the EC too: the European Sustainable Week 2022. This year 2022 has been declared European Year of Youth and many events took place involving the youngest audiences who are currently working in any area related to sustainability. Hitika participated in a policy dialogue with the Commissioner for Energy, Kadri Simson, and other young representatives in which many questions around energy and sustainability were talked through.
You can see Hitika asking her questions to Mrs. Simons from minute 1:03:00 in this video recording of the event, but we recommend you to watch it complete, as it is really interesting. “What would be the strategies adopted by the EU to consider both energy and food security while also simultaneously alleviating the problems of food inflation and energy used in this sector?” was her question to the Commissioner for Energy, at minute 1:10:00 approximately. The answer was that the Farm2Frok strategy of the EU is taking care of difficult issues, such as fertilizers and how this strategy is also focused on a green transition for all sectors involved in the food chain.
Kim Millar from TUDublin attended a regional workshop in webinar format called All-Island Workshop: Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking in HEu. The workshop took place during the 24th of June and provided the opportunity to hear experiences from several CBE Ju experts presenting local case studies as well as networking and promoting north-south collaboration. Kim was asked by the Department of Agriculture in Ireland to present about her experience at ALEHOOP and other European CBE JU projects involving bioeconomy.
Then, during the month of August – 24th to 26th –, our colleague Diego Méndez from ANFACO presented the ALEHOOP project at a congress called 4th Seaweed4Health held in the city of Ourense (Northwest Spain). Diego had a presentation called “Valorization of residual green seaweeds. ALEHOOP Project” the 25th of August. He was accompanied by several seaweed experts from different countries like Portugal, Denmark, The Netherlands, Chile, Norway or Ireland, among others, to present about several topics around Seaweed. Definitely an interesting congress to network and learn more from the posters, presentations
From the 7th to the 9th of November, the 36th EFFoST International Conference 2022: Shaping the Production of Sustainable, Healthy Foods for the Future conference took place in Dublin (Ireland). Again, our colleague Hitika Shah from TU Dublin submitted an abstract and was present during the conference.
This event was focused on healthy and sustainable food systems and how to achieve them from different ways. A lot of interesting topics were addressed during these days, such as innovative and sustainable food processes; assuring a safe, authentic, and bio-secure food supply chain; advances and challenges in alternative proteins; valorization of side streams, food waste and by-products; or food packaging to safeguard food and the environment, among others.