New research findings offer a viable solution for combating milk waste, per a report by Phys.org.
Food waste is a massive global issue, as unwanted food items end up in landfills where they emit harmful gases into the atmosphere. Those gases then end up exacerbating the planet's rising temperatures.
Each year, 1.3 billion tons of food products are thrown out, according to The World Counts. And milk is one of the most commonly wasted food products because of its short expiration date.
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🔘 Bought more than I could eat 🛒
🔘 Went bad sooner than I expected 👎
🔘 Forgot it was in the fridge 😞
🔘 Didn't want leftovers 🥡
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"Reason to cry over spilled milk," writes Magnus Stenaa Jensen of the Technical University of Denmark. "When it comes to the climate, there is actually every reason to cry over spilled milk: Methane from cattle production is one of the biggest climate culprits."
As a result, researchers from the Technical University of Denmark have teamed up with three tech companies to develop a solution for minimizing milk waste: a microchip that contains an ultracompact optical spectrometer.
With this tiny chip, the researchers are able to see the amount of liquid, fat, and proteins in dairy pipes. Therefore, they're able to determine whether the milk has been compromised from previous productions.
The microchip design is a significant improvement from the current construction of spectrometers, which are much larger in size. As a result, the microchip is not only more efficient but also significantly cheaper.
"The spectrometers used by the dairies today cost about EUR 100,000 each," DTU professor Electro Søren Stobbe said. "With our solution, the idea is to build small, compact and lower-priced spectrometers, which means that you can incorporate many more measuring points and thus know for certain when the pipes are ready for the next production run."
The researchers' microchip spectrometer is still in the early stages of development. While the team has proved the success of their spectrometer concept, they still need to commercialize it and complete further testing.
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