Environmental impacts of food waste in Europe

Waste Management
Silvia ScherhauferGudrun Obersteiner

Abstract

Approximately 88 Million tonnes (Mt) of food is wasted in the European Union each year and the environmental impacts of these losses throughout the food supply chain are widely recognised. This study illustrates the impacts of food waste in relation to the total food utilised, including the impact from food waste management based on available data at the European level. The impacts are calculated for the Global Warming Potential, the Acidification Potential and the Eutrophication Potential using a bottom-up approach using more than 134 existing LCA studies on nine representative products (apple, tomato, potato, bread, milk, beef, pork, chicken, white fish). Results show that 186 Mt CO2-eq, 1.7 Mt SO2-eq. and 0.7 Mt PO4-eq can be attributed to food waste in Europe. This is 15 to 16% of the total impact of the entire food supply chain. In general, the study confirmed that most of the environmental impacts are derived from the primary production step of the chain. That is why animal-containing food shows most of the food waste related impacts when it is extrapolated to total food waste even if cereals are higher in mass. Nearly three quarters of all food waste-related impacts for Global Warming originate from greenhouse gas emissi...Continue Reading

Citations

Nov 9, 2019·International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health·Sara SchiavoneFrancesco Attena
May 12, 2020·European Journal of Public Health·Giuseppe GrossoChristopher Birt
Aug 5, 2018·Plant Foods for Human Nutrition·Luciana Linhares de Azevedo BittencourtMaria Helena Rocha-Leão
Dec 20, 2019·Environmental Science and Pollution Research International·Ava HeidariFaezeh Alidoost
Sep 13, 2019·Waste Management & Research : the Journal of the International Solid Wastes and Public Cleansing Association, ISWA·Ilija DjekicIgor Tomasevic
Dec 22, 2020·Frontiers in Nutrition·Gioacchino PappalardoWei Yang
Jan 13, 2021·Journal of Environmental Management·María Paula FabaniGermán Mazza
Mar 2, 2021·Food Research International·Ana GiménezGastón Ares
Apr 11, 2019·Environmental Science & Technology·Li XueGang Liu

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