Improving sustainability and circularity of European food waste management with a life cycle approach

In the past years, several research initiatives have been promoted in the area of food waste. Many of these were focused on the identification of key drivers of food wastage and on the quantification of food waste generation. While these initiatives provided fairly accurate information over European food waste generation patterns and management routes, they did not always deliver comprehensive and comparable knowledge on the sustainability of food waste management and on ways to mitigate negative consequences at environmental, economic and social levels. Building on most recent methodological advancements and policy needs, the work presented in this report provides decision makers and waste managers with a life-cycle based framework methodology to quantify the environmental and economic sustainability performance of European food waste management. This methodology makes use of multi-objective optimization and Pareto optimality concepts in order to help identify most sustainable management options for food waste, intended as those that minimize environmental and economic impacts. Therefore, applying this methodology can offer relevant insights to the decision making process. The social dimension of sustainability is also addressed, though the assessment of the social performance is kept separated from the proposed framework methodology. A numerical case study is also developed. This is meant to give an example of simplified application of the proposed methodology to a fictitious European food waste management context. The environmental dimension has been evaluated with the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software EASETECH, while the economic assessment is conducted based on a number of different indicators expressing the costs associated with food waste management.