Abstract
The disposal of food waste is a large environmental problem. In the United Kingdom (UK), approximately 15 million tonnes of food are wasted each year, mostly disposed of in landfill, via composting, or anaerobic digestion (AD). European Union (EU) guidelines state that food waste should preferentially be used as animal feed though for most food waste this practice is currently illegal, because of disease control concerns. Interest in the potential diversion of food waste for animal feed is however growing, with a number of East Asian states offering working examples of safe food waste recycling – based on tight regulation and rendering food waste safe through heat treatment. This study investigates the potential benefits of diverting food waste for pig feed in the UK. A hybrid, consequential life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted to compare the environmental and health impacts of four technologies for food waste processing: two technologies of South Korean style-animal feed production (as a wet pig feed and a dry pig feed) were compared with two widespread UK disposal technologies: AD and composting. Results of 14 mid-point impact categories show that the processing of food waste as a wet pig feed and a dry pig feed have the best and second-best scores, respectively, for 13/14 and 12/14 environmental and health impacts. The low impact of food waste feed stems in large part from its substitution of conventional feed, the production of which has substantial environmental and health impacts. While the re-legalisation of the use of food waste as pig feed could offer environmental and public health benefits, this will require support from policy makers, the public, and the pig industry, as well as investment in separated food waste collection which currently occurs in only a minority of regions.
Highlights
The disposal of food waste poses a large environmental problem
This study focuses on municipal food wastes because they make up 66% of European Union (EU) food waste (Monier et al, 2010) and are suitable for animal feed e they are currently used in both South Korea and China (Chen et al, 2015; Stuart, 2009) and have historically been used in the EU (Fairlie, 2010)
Composting had the worst score for seven environmental indicators, anaerobic digestion the worst score for eight, and dry feeding the worst score for one indicator
Summary
The disposal of food waste poses a large environmental problem. Food waste is abundant: in the UK, approximately 15 million tonnes are wasted annually (234 kg/person/year or 50% of food) (WRAP, 2015) and the available disposal options each have substantial environmental impacts. To aid the selection of food waste disposal technologies, the EU provides guidelines on which disposal technologies are preferable (EC, 2014) This so-called food waste hierarchy (Fig. 1), stipulates that governments should prioritise efforts (in order of most to least preferable) to (i) reduce food waste, (ii) redistribute it (e.g. to the homeless), (iii) recycle it as animal feed and (iv) compost, (v) recover energy through anaerobic digestion, and (vi) landfill the remainder. This legislation is, notably not applied with respect to the use of food waste as animal feed, because it is currently illegal to use most food waste as feed in the EU
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