Tianfu Yao, Junnian Song, Jiahao Xing, Wei Yang
Resource recovery from the food processing sector (FPS) wastes holds significant potential, yet waste streams vary across subsectors, necessitating region-subsector-resolved identification of optimal waste management strategies. Strategy selection remains elusive due to unraveled cross-dimension environmental burden transfers and environment-cost trade-offs within subsectors. Herein, we develop an integrated decision-making framework targeting resource-recovery-oriented waste management strategies for China's FPS across 31 provincial-level regions and 11 food processing subsectors. A benchmark and five alternative scenarios centered on water reclamation, energy recovery, and material recycling are constructed under a unified system boundary. An algorithm combining region-subsector-specific impact potentials of six environmental dimensions, value added, and technology costs facilitates strategy prioritization to form optimal region-subsector decision matrices under best cost-effectiveness and maximum environmental benefit objectives. Results show that among 295 region-subsector units analyzed, the integrated upgrading scenario accounts for 50.2% of winner scenarios under the best cost-effectiveness objective, followed closely by the water-reclamation-oriented scenario at 46.1%. Under the maximum environmental benefit objective, winner scenarios strongly converge on the integrated upgrading scenario, accounting for 96.6% of units and delivering stronger impact potential reductions, although some region-subsector units exhibit a higher cost burden rate. Actionable evidence is provided for FPS to support waste management upgrading at the region-subsector scale.