Energy flows and greenhouses gases of EU (European Union) national breads using an LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) approach

Abstract Bread represents a staple food in many parts of the world including Europe. Depending on the region of origin and the respective cultural heritage bread is made with different ingredients and is consumed in various forms. This work consists of an environmental sustainability assessment of 21 different types of bread, representing a wide spectrum of typologies of such food consumed across the European Union, via a Life Cycle Assessment approach. The embedded energy and equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of each type of bread were estimated, from cradle to bakery gate, by considering a mass, a nutritional value and a price based functional unit. Overall, the results have highlighted the variability of the embedded energy and the equivalent GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions associated to the consumption of the 21 kinds of bread rooted in the cultural environment of 21 EU countries. When considering a functional unit of 1 kg of bread, the Cumulative Energy Demand results range from 9 MJ/kg to 32.9 MJ/kg. The Global Warming Potential indicator has a minimum value of 0.5 kgCO 2eq /kg and a maximum of 6.6 kgCO 2eq /kg. For a functional unit amounting to a 100 kcal provided by the consumption of bread, the Cumulative Energy Demand results vary from 0.33 MJ/100 kcal to 0.93 MJ/100 kcal whilst the Global Warming Potential indicator varies from 0.019 kgCO 2eq /100 kcal to 0.135 kgCO 2eq /100 kcal. For a functional unit amounting to the quantity of bread purchased with 1€ (weighted according to the purchasing price of each nation in the European Union), the Cumulative Energy Demand results vary from 1.197 MJ/€ to 3.708 MJ/€ whilst the Global Warming Potential indicator varies from 0.15 kgCO2 eq /€ to 0.376 kgCO2 eq /€. The study has pinpointed the importance of evaluating food, in terms of environmental sustainability, with more than one type of functional unit in order to account not only for the bread's nutritional purposes but also the need to satisfy social, cultural, hedonistic and other qualitative functions. Specifically, when using a mass based functional unit, the less impactful results involve bread types with simple recipes, based essentially on flour, yeast and water. By assessing the breads with an energy based functional unit, bread types which also contain vegetable oils and small amounts of animal based ingredients result as more carbon and energy friendly. The use of a price based functional unit indicates that the higher priced bread types, manufactured with more expensive ingredients that are produced in an environmentally efficient manner, are the more sustainable ones. Overall, for many types of bread, the energy consumption during the production phase, in particular the baking process, represents a hot spot and is dependent on the size and shape of the bread. Furthermore, the efficiency of ingredient production (in terms of material and energy use and in terms of the respective yields of each nation in the European Union), such as that of milk and flour, also influences the sustainability of the bread types

life cycle assessment of steel produced in an italian integrated steel mill

The purpose of this work is to carry out an accurate and extensive environmental analysis of the steel production occurring in in the largest integrated EU steel mill, located in the city of Taranto in southern Italy. The end goal is that of highlighting the steelworks' main hot spots and identifying potential options for environmental improvement. The development for such an analysis is based on a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of steel production with a cradle to casting plant gate approach that covers the stages from raw material extraction to solid steel slab production. The inventory results have highlighted the large solid waste production, especially in terms of slag, which could be reused in other industries as secondary raw materials. Other reuses, in accordance with the circular economy paradigm, could encompass the energy waste involved in the steelmaking process. The most burdening lifecycle phases are the ones linked to blast furnace and coke oven operations. Specifically, the impact categories are influenced by the energy consumption and also by the toxicity of the emissions associated with the lifecycle of steel production. A detailed analysis of the toxicity impacts indicates that LCA is still not perfectly suitable for toxicity assessments and should be coupled with other more site specific studies in order to understand such aspects fully. Overall, the results represent a first step to understanding the current levels of sustainability of the steelworks, which should be used as a starting point for the development both of pollution control measures and of symbiotic waste reutilization scenarios needed to maintain the competitiveness of the industrial plant

Environmental impacts of food consumption in Europe

AbstractFood consumption is amongst the main drivers of environmental impacts. On one hand, there is the need to fulfil a fundamental human need for nutrition, and on the other hand this poses critical threats to the environment. In order to assess the environmental impact of food consumption, a lifecycle assessment (LCA)-based approach has been applied to a basket of products, selected as being representative of EU consumption. A basket of food products was identified as representative of the average food and beverage consumption in Europe, reflecting the relative importance of the products in terms of mass and economic value. The products in the basket are: pork, beef, poultry, milk, cheese, butter, bread, sugar, sunflower oil, olive oil, potatoes, oranges, apples, mineral water, roasted coffee, beer and pre-prepared meals. For each product in the basket, a highly disaggregated inventory model was developed based on a modular approach, and built using statistical data. The environmental impact of the average food consumption of European citizens was assessed using the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) methodology. The overall results indicate that, for most of the impact categories, the consumed foods with the highest environmental burden are meat products (beef, pork and poultry) and dairy products (cheese, milk and butter). The agricultural phase is the lifecycle stage that has the highest impact of all the foods in the basket, due to the contribution of agronomic and zootechnical activities. Food processing and logistics are the next most important phases in terms of environmental impacts, due to their energy intensity and the related emissions to the atmosphere that occur through the production of heat, steam and electricity and during transport. Regarding the end-of-life phase, human excretion and wastewater treatments pose environmental burdens related to eutrophying substances whose environmental impacts are greater than those of the agriculture, transports and processing phases. Moreover, food losses which occur throughout the whole lifecycle, in terms of agricultural/industrial and domestic food waste, have also to be taken into consideration, since they can amount to up to 60% of the initial weight of the food products. The results of the study go beyond the mere assessment of the potential impacts associated with food consumption, as the overall approach may serve as a baseline for testing eco-innovation scenarios for impact reduction as well as for setting targets

Life cycle assessment of Italian and Spanish bovine leather production systems

The objectives of the research here described were to put inevidence the eco-profiles of two product-systems concerning bovine leather manufactured in Italy and Spain, to identify their hot spots and to find out if the different technologies and cooperative management solutions adopted led to significant environmental differences in the two systems analysed. The environmental impacts of two systems were analysed by means of the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. At the macro-phase level, tanning resulted to be the most burdensome phase for almost all impact categories in both systems. At the level of the specific tannery phases, themain hot spots were tanning, dyeing-retaining and soakingin the Italian system, soaking-liming, tanning and retanningin the Spanish one. The main differences between the two systems and a few options for improvement were identified at three levels: energy mix, industrial processes and solid waste management. Despite the technological and waste management dissimilarity of the two systems, their total environmental burdens appeared quite similar. However, relevant differencesin the most burdening phases, operations and substances are highlighted in this paper. Improvements in both systems should be aimed at by means of an optimisation of tanning processes and reduction of chemicals use. Further studies dealing within ventories of recovery processes and land fill disposal of wastes are recommended

The Use of FPGA in Drift Chambers for High Energy Physics Experiments

In this chapter, we describe the design of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) board capable of acquiring the information coming from a fast digitization of the signals generated in a drift chambers. The digitized signals are analyzed using an ad hoc real‐time algorithm implemented in the FPGA in order to reduce the data throughput coming from the particle detector

Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF) di un’azienda polisettoriale della Provincia di Taranto

Con la Raccomandazione del 9 aprile 2013, la Commissione europea in collaborazione con il Joint Research Centre di Ispra ha dato avvio alla sperimentazione della metodologia Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF) per misurare l’impronta ambientale delle organizzazioni nella prospettiva del ciclo di vita. Lo strumento si prefigge di ridurre gli impatti ambientali connessi alle attività delle organizzazioni, tenendo conto di tutte le attività della catena di approvvigionamento (dall’estrazione delle materie prime alla gestione finale dei rifiuti), al fine di migliorare l’efficienza delle risorse delle imprese e la loro competitività. Il presente lavoro illustra i risultati dell’applicazione dello strumento OEF ad un’importante impresa polisettoriale localizzata nel Comune di Taranto, la “Italcave S.p.A.”, con lo scopo di identificare i punti critici dell’attività organizzativa nel suo complesso e valutare le possibili soluzioni da apportare all’organizzazione in termini di riduzione degli impatti ambiental

Energy use in the EU food sector: State of play and opportunities for improvement

The amount of energy necessary to cultivate, process, pack and bring the food to European citizens tables accounts for the 17 % of the EU's gross energy consumption, equivalent to about 26 % of the EU's final energy consumption in 2013. Challenges and solutions for decreasing energy consumption and increasing the use of renewable energy in the European food sector are presented and discussed.JRC.F.7-Renewables and Energy Efficienc