EATS: a life cycle-based decision support tool for local authorities and school caterers

Abstract

Purpose This paper describes the research that underpins the development of EATS (the Environmental Assessment Tool for School meals), a life cycle-based decision support tool for local authorities and their contractors responsible for providing catering services to schools. The purpose of this tool is to quantify the carbon footprint (CF) and water footprint (WF) of the meals served in order to identify hotspot meals and ingredients, and suggest simple, yet transformative, reduction measures. A case study is used to test the tool, comparing the impacts of 34 school meal recipes. Methods The tool utilises secondary data to calculate values of CF and WF for a school meal from cradle to plate. This includes three phases: (1) food production, (2) transport of each ingredient to a generic school kitchen in the UK, and (3) meal preparation. Considerations for waste along the supply chain are included. After testing the tool against a set of nutritionally compliant meals, a sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the influence of the origin and seasonality of the ingredients, transport mode and cooking appliances used on the final results. Results and discussionThe results of the case study show the predominance of the production phase in the overall carbon footprint and that there is a strong tendency towards lower impacts for meat-free meals; however, this is not always the case, for instance some of the chicken-based meals present lower impacts than vegetarian meals rich in dairy ingredients. The sensitivity analysis performed on one of the meals shows that the highest value of CF is obtained when the horticultural products are out of season and produced in heated greenhouses, whilst the highest value of WF is obtained when the origin of the ingredients is unknown and the global average values of WF are used in the analysis; this defines a crucial data need if accurate analyses are to be uniformly possible. Conclusions This article focuses on the potential offered by the public food sector for a transformative reduction in the environmental impact of urban food consumption. The results presented prove that careful menu planning and procurement choices can considerably reduce the overall environmental impact of the service provided without compromising quality or variety. This research thus supports those responsible for making these decisions via a user-friendly tool based on robust scientific evidence.

The Use of Life Cycle-Based Approaches in the Food Service Sector to Improve Sustainability: A Systematic Review

“…Saxe et al [44] found that main meals with beef have 8-11 times higher environmental impact than an average vegetarian meal. However, other studies [34,36] highlighted that even though vegetarian meals tend to have the lowest impact in general, certain types of vegetarian meals (i.e., those rich in animal-based ingredients such as dairy) had an environmental impact as high as average meat-based meals (e.g., meals with chicken, for example, [34]). Such findings highlight issues with the definitions of meals used in LCA studies.…”

“…The second approach focuses on the assessment of the environmental impact of entire meals instead of individual ingredients. Studies adopting this approach tend to use either the functional unit of an average meal [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] or a given quantity of prepared product (ready meal) [42][43][44], instead of using a mass based functional unit of ingredients. Regardless of the choice of functional unit, these studies usually compare the environmental impact of different types of meals (e.g., meat-based meals vs. vegetarian meals).…”

“…Regardless of the choice of functional unit, these studies usually compare the environmental impact of different types of meals (e.g., meat-based meals vs. vegetarian meals). A common finding among studies is that vegetarian meals have considerably lower environmental impact than meat-based meals [34,[36][37][38]44,45]. Saarinen et al [37], for example, found that meat-based lunches have two to three times greater climate impact, and four to five times greater eutrophication impact than vegetarian meals.…”

“…On the other hand, the second approach, which aims to integrate nutritional assessment into LCA by using various nutrition-based functional units, addresses this problem. However, it is more complex and therefore to date, only a handful of studies in the catering sector have adopted this approach, e.g., [34,37].…”

Sustainable Perspective in Public Educational Institutions Restaurants: From Foodstuffs Purchase to Meal Offer

“…Studies report remarkable emission of carbon dioxide equivalents in the production, transport and food preparation phases, having the transport phase the lowest carbon footprint. However, the reduced impact at this stage can be underestimated due to the lack of accurate information on the origin of the ingredients [45,46].…”