Abstract
Due to tremendous losses of resources in modern food supply chains, higher priority should be given to reducing food waste and environmental impacts of food production. In practice, multiple production options are available, but must be quantitatively assessed with respect to economic and environmental performances before they are adopted in food supply chains. The objective of this paper is to develop a mathematical model that can be used for such a quantitative assessment of alternative production options that are associated with different ways to deal with waste in food supply chains, i.e. prevention, recycling, and disposal of food waste. We develop a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model to derive the set of eco-efficient solutions corresponding to production planning decisions. Environmental performance of the chain is expressed with an indicator based on exergy analysis, which has the potential to capture other commonly used indicators, such as energy consumption, fuel consumption, and waste generation, and express them in a single value. This simplifies the calculation of the eco-efficient frontier, and enables its intuitive graphical representation, which is much easier to communicate to the involved decision makers. The applicability of the developed model is demonstrated on a real-life industrial bread supply chain in the Netherlands. Results confirm the findings from literature that prevention is the best waste management strategy from environmental perspective. The advantages of using exergy as an indicator to capture the environmental performance is demonstrated by comparing the outcomes to other commonly used indicators of environmental performance. We illustrate the potential of studying food production planning decision problems in a multi-objective context, and demonstrate the applicability of the model in the assessment of alternative production options.
Highlights
Until recently, food production focused mainly on delivering high quality products at low costs with only secondary attention on environmental impacts, food losses, and depletion of natural resources
The objective of this paper is to develop a mathematical model that can be used to optimise production decisions in food supply chains by quantifying trade-offs between conflicting economic and environmental indicators, and by exploring alternative production options with specific attention to food waste
The section discusses the conceptual model, in which we describe three options to produce a food product, introduce the concept of exergy analysis, which is used for quantification of environmental impact, and present the multi-objective mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model used to support production planning decisions in a food supply chain
Summary
Food production focused mainly on delivering high quality products at low costs with only secondary attention on environmental impacts, food losses, and depletion of natural resources. FSCs are challenged to adopt new technologies that reduce or valorise food waste. These technologies can contribute to maintaining or increasing economic output and reducing environmental impact of current operations i.e. achieving what has been defined as eco-efficiency (Braungart et al 2007). Quantitative assessment of both the economic and environmental benefits of these alternative technologies and production options increase the adoption rate and facilitates managerial decision making. Production planning models that optimize decisions on how, how much, what and when to produce to meet the demand can be used to combine available production options and assess quantitatively the economic and environmental consequences of new technologies
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