Life Cycle Assessment Tool for Food Supply Chain Environmental Evaluation

Tamíris Pacheco da Costa, James Gillespie, Katarzyna Pelc, Abi Adefisan, Michael Adefisan, Ramakrishnan Ramanathan, Fionnuala Murphy, Shaojian Qu (Editor)

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)
151 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Food is at the centre of efforts to combat climate change, reduce water stress, pollution, and conserve the world’s wildlife. Assessing the environmental performance of food companies is essential to provide a comprehensive view of the production processes and gain insight into improvement options, but such a tool is currently non-existent in the literature. This study proposed a tool based on the life cycle assessment methodology focused on six stages of the food chain, raw materials acquisition, supplier, manufacturing, distribution, retail and wastes. The user can also evaluate the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to reduce food waste applied in the real-world problems. The tool was validated through a case study of a food manufacturing company that prepares frozen meals via vending machines. The LCA results provided by the tool showed that food raw materials production is the main hotspot of nine impact categories. The IoT technologies’ contribution increased the company’s impact by around 0.4%. However, it is expected that employing these monitoring technologies would prevent food waste generation and the associated environmental impacts. Therefore, the results of this paper provide evidence that the proposed tool is suitable for determining environmental impacts and savings of food supply chain companies.
Original languageEnglish
Article number718
Pages (from-to)1-24
Number of pages24
JournalSustainability
Volume15
Issue number1
Early online date31 Dec 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished online - 31 Dec 2022

Keywords

  • Article
  • environmental analysis
  • food supply chain
  • IoT technologies
  • life cycle assessment
  • excel-based tool
  • stand-alone model

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