Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) - What food compliance professionals need to know скачать в хорошем качестве

Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) - What food compliance professionals need to know

Karen Constable of The Rotten Apple, a weekly newsletter for food professionals, policy-makers and purveyors, explains what food compliance professionals need to know about life cycle assessments. Find the full article and links to sources here: https://therottenapple.substack.com/p... Transcript: Like many food compliance professionals, I’m not completely confident in my knowledge of sustainability claims for food. But with more companies being accused of “greenwashing” every week, it’s important that all food professionals understand the basic concepts that underpin sustainability claims. Last month Tesco (a major British food retailer) joined a long line of food companies that have been publicly disgraced for making unsubstantiated claims about their products’ sustainability – in other words, “greenwashing”. The United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) took action after consumers complained. The problem? … advertisements for Tesco’s Plant Chef vegan burgers claimed that eating them can “make a difference to the planet”. To be honest, compared to eating a meat-based burger, it would be hard to argue that a plant-based burger isn’t at least a little bit “better”, at least with respect to greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, Tesco got slapped with a ban. The ASA said that Tesco should have had evidence based on the full life cycle of the product, and a comparison with the full life cycle assessment (LCA) of a meat burger. Tesco did not have a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for their burger. A Life Cycle Assessment is an assessment of the potential environmental impacts of a product over its entire ‘life’, including greenhouse gas emissions, depletion of land, water use, toxicity, minerals and other extractive industries. Life cycle assessments also address the recyclability of a product and its packaging. To create an LCA, you start by mapping the life cycle of the product, including its sourcing, production, distribution, use, disposal and recovery. Inputs and outputs such as energy use and raw materials and included. The completed LCA can be used as a decision-making tool to help a business decide which product or production method is more sustainable than another and to see where improvements can be gained. Tesco could have used an LCA to “prove” that their plant-based burgers were better for the planet than an equivalent meat-based burger. If only they had bothered to create one.