Giuseppe Martino Nicoletti

Environmental implications of food loss probability in packaging design

Abstract In this paper, a new perspective of food packaging design is proposed by using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, in which shelf life and food loss probability were taken into account. The study focused on twenty-four scenarios of packaging of a ripened cheese obtained from sheep milk, in order to analyze the environmental implications of different packaging systems in terms of potential food loss. The aim is to provide an eco-indicator able to quantify the environmental indirect effects related to the different choices in the food packaging. Results highlighted that, by considering only the direct inputs and outputs of the packaging system, thinner and recyclable packaging materials sealed in air are more sustainable from an environmental point of view. On the contrary, if indirect effects of food loss probability are also taken into account (e.g. production and transport of cheese in order to reconstruct the stockpile), multilayer systems under modified headspace conditions are preferred packaging solutions. This is consequence of the fact that cheese production brings about high environmental impacts if compared to the other phases of the life cycle, therefore, the environmental implications of the choices adopted for the packaging phase are more affected from the capacity of reducing food losses than from the production and disposing of packaging materials.

Life Cycle Assessment in the Olive Oil Sector

The olive oil industry is a significant productive sector in the European Union and the related production process is characterised by a variety of different practices and techniques for the agricultural production of olives and for their processing into olive oil. Depending on these different procedures, olive oil production is associated with several adverse effects on the environment, both in the agricultural and in the olive oil production phase. As a consequence, tools such as LCA are becoming increasingly important for this type of industry. Following an overview of the characteristics of the olive oil supply chain and its main environmental problems, the authors of this chapter provide a description of the international state of the art of LCA implementation in this specific sector, as well as briefly describing other life cycle thinking methodologies and tools (such as simplified LCA, footprint labels and Environmental Product Declarations). Then, the methodological problems connected with the application of LCA in the olive oil production sector are analysed in depth, starting from a critical comparative analysis of the applicative LCA case studies in the olive oil production supply chain. Finally, guidelines for the application of LCA in the olive oil production sector are proposed.

Environmental input-output analysis and hybrid approaches to improve the set up of the pasta life cycle inventory

Input-Output analysis has been recently proposed as a method to account for environmental burdens associated with a product life cycle (IO-LCA). This top-down technique refers to economic IO tables by taking the entire economy as system boundaries, without needing the use of cut-off criteria as necessarily done in the LCA studies. Although the completeness of the results obtained with IO-LCA, the use of monetary flows leads to several limitations due especially to the degree of aggregation of statistical data. Because of these shortcomings, in this paper the LCA and the IO-LCA will be applied to the same case study - pasta life cycle - in order to verify if the adoption of both could improve the quality of the inventory set up. The LCA has been conducted by following the ISO 14040 rules, while the IO-LCA by following two different methodologies: the Environmental Input Output Life Cycle Assessment, EIOLCA, and the Missing Inventory Estimation Tool, MIET, as stated by the relative softwares available on the web. Moreover, some hybrid methods partially contemplated by the literature have been applied. The paper shows that the I-O approach could permit to overcome some limitations, which are typical of the LCA, but, at the same time, could lead to other problems. The adoption of the hybrid methods could help to overcome the limitations of both the approaches (physical and monetary) but, before applying them, a good knowledge of their pro and cons is required in order to choose the typologies of material flows which have to be modelled by one or by the other approach.