LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

PARALLEL SESSION 4B: DIET 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
2.2. Environmental assessment
The following functional unit was chosen: “to product, supply and consume and average food basket per
person in France in 2009”.
The carbon footprint of each basket was established looking at each step of the products life cycle. Given
the variable accessibility to data according to the life cycle step, different approaches were used to evaluate
the associated greenhouse gases emissions.
Cultivation and farming
Literature review was performed to list available and usable carbon footprints. Obviously, the list of food
products provided by Kantar Worldpanel was not completely covered by the publications results; simple
original products like kiwis, or processed products such as ratatouille have no publicly available environmental
information. In addition, organic products have been far less studied than conventional ones, and
often lack environmental impact data.
When missing, environmental information for conventional items were estimated conducted simplified
LCA, or by analogy with closest products (e.g. grapefruit environmental burdens were considered equal to
oranges ones). We acknowledge the uncertainty related to these approximations. Regarding organic items,
missing environmental data was replaced with conventional products ones (e.g. organic goat milk environmental
impacts were replaced with conventional goat milk burdens).
From raw material transportation to consumer use
Several scenarios were established for each of the following steps of the products life cycles. Number and
parameters of the scenarios were defined according to their representativeness and their influence on the final
results.
Raw material freight: 2 scenarios based on transportation modes and distances differences;
Industrial processing: 19 scenarios based on the energy consumption and the refrigerant emissions;
Packaging: only primary packaging were considered and 14 scenarios were modelled based on
material type and weight, and industrial processes;
Distribution and retail: 3 scenarios according to storage conditions;
Consumer use: 6 scenarios depending on the storage and cooking practices.
GHG emissions were calculated for each of these scenarios.
End-of-life
A survey performed on behalf of the ADEME (ADEME, 2007) mentions that a French consumer wastes
about 79 kg or food per year on average, meaning that 16% of the food constituting our basket is thrown
away. This figure is in agreement with values provided by WRAP (WRAP, 2008) which indicates that 68 kg
of food is wasted per person and per year in the UK. However, different values have been found in other
studies. For instance, Munoz (Munoz et al., 2010) indicates that approximately 200 kg of food waste are
produced per person and per year in Spain. The 79 kg value was used in the study but this value remains
quite uncertain and a more precise assessment of food waste is needed.
Repartition of waste according to their destination (landfill, incineration, recovery) was made thanks to
data from the ADEME (2007) and the ADEME AFNOR platform for packagings (2011).
3. Results
3.1. Organic and conventional consumption patterns
Kantar Worldpanel provided us with a list of 215 food items which were distributed into 10 categories:
Meat, fish and eggs; Dairies; Ready-made meals; Fruits and vegetables; Starchy foods; Bakery wares; Condiments;
Coffee, tea and chocolate drinks; Beverages and Baby food.
Among the 215 items, 149 were distinguished between organic and conventional, 66 remained undetermined.
Conventional and organic consumers’ purchases amount to 524 and 496 kg per year, with respective
mass shares of organic products of 0.3 and 11.6%, beverages excluded.
Figure 2 shows the composition of the five food baskets. We can notice that organic consumer’s purchases
exceed conventional ones by near 30 kg. This can be explained by the higher incomes of this population,
and by the need of consuming more given the less energy dense products purchased.
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