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Development of a Sustainability Indicator for processing of food
Project
Project code: MRI-LBV-08-54
Contract period: 01.01.2010
- 31.12.2020
Purpose of research: Applied research
Studies on the determination of energy consumption for food processing have shown that greenhouse gas emissions associated with these processes represent only a minor portion of all interactions between food supply chain activities and environmental resources. Not least because foodstuff is an energy carrier by itself, it is self-evident not only to compare the total energy expenditure for preparation of a certain food product with its calorific value, but also to attempt to calculate almost all relevant interactions with natural resources (e.g. land use and land use change, water supply, waste management, packaging, transport) in terms of an energy expenditure. By doing so, it should be possible to assign even the use of natural resources and the utilisation of common properties (e.g. clean air, fresh water, seafish and other wildlife stocks, forests) to each product. Energy would be a measure for the efforts which have to be made to restore the original quality of an environmental resource before its utilisation for food production purposes. By defining quite a number of environmentally relevant interactions in terms of energy it would be possible in conflict of goals to balance the different aspects on the same linear scale and to derive optimised advice from that information. Provided that energy expenditure definitions at all processing steps will be related to a high level of sustainability, the sum of all energy expenditures could be utilised as a universal sustainability indicator for the product to be considered. Project activity aims at the preparation of a set of definitions and exemplary data derived from official statistics and scientific papers. Once that kind of calculations will be available for the most important groups of foodstuff, different profiles of energy expenditure along the production chain could be generated and comparisons between different types of food regarding their ecological implications could be made on a reliable and coherent data basis.
Section overview
Subjects
- Food Processing
- Climate Change
Framework programme
Funding programme
Excutive institution
MRI - Department of Food and Bio Process Engineering (MRI-LBV)
