Life cycle assessment for food production and manufacturing: recent trends, global applications and future prospects

Abstract

The food production and manufacturing industry involves an extensive amount of raw materials, energy and water consumption, and releases a significant amount of wastes to the environment. In order to enhance the environmental performance of this sector, the measurement or assessment of current performance and identification of hotspots are imperative. In this regard, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive and commonly known tool, which is also applicable to various food products, processes, etc. Recently, LCA has been frequently used in different studies around the globe as an environmental impact assessment method in food production and manufacturing sectors. These studies were based on different and varied food items, assessment boundaries, aiding tools, indicators, impact categories, etc. Therefore, there is a need for a recent review study to provide an updated status and future research prospects of LCA for food production and manufacturing industries. The primary objective this article is to review and analyze the recent (published from 2010 to 2018) LCA studies in order to depict the status quo of LCA applications and describe future research directions. The results showed that recent studies were more focused on cradle-to-grave and cradle-to-factory out gate assessment boundaries while covering multiple life cycle phases. Currently, product level assessment was more common than sector or process level evaluation. Most of the reviewed studies did not rely only on one type of data, but the collected data were based on primary as well as secondary sources. Mass allocation of resources and burdens was comparatively more common than other allocation methods. Additionally, most of the reviewed LCA studies were limited to the mid-point impact category only, whereas end-point impacts were overlooked. Based on the challenges in the application of LCA, future research avenues were also presented. In the future, using LCA in a more consistent way and focusing further on process level assessments in food manufacturing industries may provide more detailed and comparable results.