Abstract
Bread waste represents a significant part of food waste in Sweden. At the same time, the return system established between bakeries and retailers enables a flow of bread waste that is not contaminated with other food waste products. This provides an opportunity for alternative valorisation and waste management options, in addition to the most common municipal waste treatment, namely anaerobic digestion and incineration. An attributional life cycle assessment of the management of 1 kg of surplus bread was conducted to assess the relative environmental impacts of alternative and existing waste management options. Eighteen impact categories were assessed using the ReCiPe methodology. The different management options that were investigated for the surplus bread are donation, use as animal feed, beer production, ethanol production, anaerobic digestion, and incineration. These results are also compared to reducing the production of bread by the amount of surplus bread (reduction at the source). The results support a waste hierarchy where reduction at the source has the highest environmental savings, followed by use of surplus bread as animal feed, donation, for beer production and for ethanol production. Anaerobic digestion and incineration offer the lowest environmental savings, particularly in a low-impact energy system. The results suggests that Sweden can make use of the established return system to implement environmentally preferred options for the management of surplus bread.
Highlights
Food waste leads to a loss of the resources that are invested in the supply chain, such as water, energy, fertilizers, and land, which are used in the production, transport and storage of food products
The environmental impact for each valorisation or waste management option is shown in relation to the best result in each impact category, which is arbitrarily given an impact of À100%
The trend seen by the results in the eighteen impact categories supported the waste hierarchy: source reduction of bread waste is the preferred option followed by feed production, donation, beer production and ethanol production
Summary
Food waste leads to a loss of the resources that are invested in the supply chain, such as water, energy, fertilizers, and land, which are used in the production, transport and storage of food products. These materials and processes have different environmental impacts, such as global warming, acidification, and eutrophication. The loss of food results in the loss of the product itself, and of all of the resources used in the supply chain This problem has been recognized by the United Nations in the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015).
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