Desafio da gestão dos resíduos sólidos em unidades de alimentação e nutrição: proposições para legislação, instituições e formação profissional

Abstract

Although widely discussed, environmental management is still on the fringes of some enterprise branches. Amongst the national industries that have not aroused to the environmental management yet, it can be mentioned the segment of collective meals, although it is considered recent, emerged as a consequence of industrial development of recent decades and should have noted to the fact that wastes from their activities constitute a considerable portion of pollutants. The industrial food preparation in a sustainable procedure should not only be related to the production, processing and separation, processes that use large amounts of natural resources and generate wastes of various types. It also needs to consider that at the stage of industrialization, it has the energy consumption and the production of solid, liquid and gaseous wastes. Even after the cycle of production is complete and the final product reaches the consumers table, the impact will still remain, due to the disposal of the surplus food, the packagings and the substances used in the hygienic process of the utensils, equipments and installations. With interest in studying environmental management to integrate it into the routines of meal production, it became important to investigate the management of solid waste in units of food and nutrition as a strategy to propose adjustments in environmental legislation, in higher education institutions and in the curriculum of undergraduate courses in nutrition. The steps of the research were: contextualize the procedures applied to solid waste generated by unit of food and nutrition in different size and types of services, analyze the environmental legislation by identifying the criteria established for environmental licensing of activities and enterprises of the food industry and its compatibility with the sector of collective meals, analyze the service contract for the food area and the institutional level waste management, determinations for solid waste management units of food and nutrition and investigate whether the disciplines environmental management and or waste management are included in the curriculum of undergraduate courses in nutrition. The methodology used in this study is qualitative, conducted by applied research, which proposes to generate knowledge to practical implementation aimed at the solution of specific problems. The methodological instruments selected for this study were document analysis, non-participant observation and semi-structured interview. This study made it possible to identify hiatus in environmental laws and the educational background of nutritionists, contributing for the environmental management does not integrate to the traditional routines of collective meals companies not even to be addressed in journals. It is important to dialogue with class entities and also the legislative for the national policy of solid waste is conducted by companies of collective meals, not only for the legal size and potential pollutant criteria, but they represent an industrial segment in large expansion in the country.