Research article - Peer-reviewed, 2020
Environmental impacts of waste management and valorisation pathways for surplus bread in Sweden
Brancoli, Pedro; Bolton, Kim; Eriksson, MattiasAbstract
Bread waste represents a significant part of food waste in Sweden. At the same time, the return system established between bakeries and retailers enables a flow of bread waste that is not contaminated with other food waste products. This provides an opportunity for alternative valorisation and waste management options, in addition to the most common municipal waste treatment, namely anaerobic digestion and incineration. An attributional life cycle assessment of the management of 1 kg of surplus bread was conducted to assess the relative environmental impacts of alternative and existing waste management options. Eighteen impact categories were assessed using the ReCiPe methodology. The different management options that were investigated for the surplus bread are donation, use as animal feed, beer production, ethanol production, anaerobic digestion, and incineration. These results are also compared to reducing the production of bread by the amount of surplus bread (reduction at the source). The results support a waste hierarchy where reduction at the source has the highest environmental savings, followed by use of surplus bread as animal feed, donation, for beer production and for ethanol production. Anaerobic digestion and incineration offer the lowest environmental savings, particularly in a low-impact energy system. The results suggests that Sweden can make use of the established return system to implement environmentally preferred options for the management of surplus bread. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.Keywords
Food waste; Bread; LCA; Waste hierarchy; Waste treatment; PreventionPublished in
Waste Management2020, volume: 117, pages: 136-145
Authors' information
Brancoli, Pedro
University of Borås
Bolton, Kim
University of Borås
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Energy and Technology
Associated SLU-program
Food Waste
Sustainable Development Goals
SDG12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
UKÄ Subject classification
Food Science
Environmental Sciences
Environmental Management
Publication Identifiers
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2020.07.043
URI (permanent link to this page)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/107092