Operational Framework to Quantify "Quality of Recycling" across Different Material Types.

Many pledges and laws are setting recycling targets without clearly defining quality of recycling. Striving to close this gap, this study presents an operational framework to quantify quality of recycling. The framework comprises three dimensions: the Virgin Displacement Potential (VDP); In-Use Stocks Lifetime (IUSL); and Environmental Impact (EI). The VDP indicates to what extent a secondary material can be used as a substitute for virgin material; the IUSL indicates how much of a certain material is still functional in society over a given time frame, and the EI is a measure of the environmental impact of a recycling process. The three dimensions are aggregated by plotting them in a distance-to-target graph. Two example calculations are included on poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) and glass. The results indicate that the recycling of bottle and container glass collected via a deposit-refund system has the lowest distance-to-target, at 1.05, and, thus, the highest quality of recycling. For PET bottles, the highest quality of recycling is achieved in closed-loop mechanical recycling of bottles (distance to optimal quality of 0.96). Furthermore, sensitivity analysis indicates that certain parameters, e.g., the collection rate for PET bottles, can reduce the distance-to-target to 0.75 when all bottles are collected for recycling.

Rebound effects of food waste prevention: Environmental impacts.

Food waste prevention across the food supply chain has been addressed by the European Union (EU) as the top priority to reduce farm-to-fork impacts. Despite the environmental benefits of food waste prevention are widely acknowledged, life cycle assessments usually do not account for rebound effects, the inclusion of which may decrease or even cancel out the expected environmental savings. Rebound effects are understood as the re-spending of accrued monetary savings, determined by the implementation of food waste prevention initiatives, either on the same product (i.e. direct effects - food) or on other products and/or services (i.e. indirect - non-food) including economy-wide effects (macroeconomic rebound effects). Macroeconomic rebound effects were quantified by means of the global equilibrium model Fidelio and were then converted into environmental impacts by performing an environmentally extended input-output analysis based on the assessment method Environmental Footprint 3.0. From an environmental and an economic perspective, it was found that food waste prevention initiatives across the entire food supply chain were beneficial, but efforts targeting households should be prioritised as the largest potential savings were obtained at this stage. Prevention initiatives implemented at households were associated with potential savings of up to 1 t CO2-eq. t-1, which was reduced to a potential saving of 0.6 t CO2-eq. t-1, corresponding to a 38 % decrease, when accounting for macroeconomic rebound effects. Finally, our results highlighted the importance of accounting for adjustment costs in the production stages of the food supply chain.

Quality of recycling: Urgent and undefined.

Quality of recycling is a concept used by many authors in the scientific literature and the EU legislator. However, a clear definition of what is intended for quality of recycling and a framework for operationalising it is lacking. Most studies, while proposing indicators reflecting quality, leave the concept of quality largely undefined. Such lack of clarity is an obstacle to the conception of robust policies addressing recycling and circular economy. In this article, we review the available studies investigating on recycling quality, synthetize the approaches available and conclude suggesting a way forward for research to operationalise the definition to support circular economy policy measures and monitoring. Essentially, quality is not an on/off criterion. The definition of quality of recycling should consider that quality depends on technical characteristics of the recyclate, which determine if it is adequate (thus functional) for a certain end application or not. Furthermore, it should consider that the recyclate can be used in different end applications over different markets and that can be adequate for substitution of primary resources in certain applications, but less or not in others. At system-wide level, this results in a certain degree of virgin resource substitution. To this end, preserving functionality, i.e. minimising the recyclate loss of functions via functional recycling, is key. Drawing upon studies on waste management, life cycle assessment and resource dissipation, we link the concept of functionality to substitutability of virgin resources and broader suitability in the circular economy, striving to show the linkages between different perspectives.

A Quantitative Sustainability Assessment of Food Waste Management in the European Union.

In an endeavor to make Europe carbon-neutral, and to foster a circular economy, improving food waste management has been identified by the European Union (EU) as a key factor. In this study, we consider 21 pathways, covering: (i) prevention; (ii) reuse for both human consumption and animal feed; (iii) material recycling as an input into the food and chemical industries; (iv) nutrient recycling; and (v) energy/fuel recovery. To include all types of impact, a sustainability assessment, encompassing environmental, economic, and social pillars, is performed and complemented with societal life cycle costing. The results indicate that after prevention, reuse for human consumption and animal feed is the most preferred option, and, in most cases, nutrient recycling and energy recovery are favored over material recycling for chemical production. While highlighting that the food waste management hierarchy should be supported with quantitative sustainability analyses, the findings also illustrate that biochemical pathways should be improved to be competitive despite the fact that food waste valorization has the potential to satisfy the EU demand for the chemicals investigated. Yet, the results clearly show that the potential benefits of improving emerging technologies would still not eclipse the benefits related to food waste prevention and its redistribution.

High-value products from food waste: An environmental and socio-economic assessment.

The use of food waste as feedstock in the manufacture of high-value products is considered a promising avenue for achieving (bio)circular economy goals. The use of residual biomass helps decrease fossil fuel dependency whilst simultaneously reducing the demand for additional biomass resource. Despite the interest in exploiting food waste in high-value product manufacturing, few studies assess the sustainability of such applications. In this study a life cycle assessment, a conventional and a societal life cycle costing were performed to evaluate the impacts of five standalone case studies based on wet animal feed, protein-concentrated animal feed, lactic, polylactic and succinic acid production from food waste. The results showed that animal feed production decreased global warming and socio-economic potential impacts relative to conventional feed products. Biochemical manufacturing incurred higher impacts from both the environmental and the socio-economic perspectives. These technologies are characterised by a low technology readiness level that should be taken into account when interpreting and using the results. Precisely for this reason, extensive uncertainty and sensitivity analyses were performed for each biochemical production technology to establish the hotspots, which were identified in steam and ancillary materials consumption, and feedstock-to-product yield. This suggests where to centre future optimisation and research efforts to achieve sustainable competitive technologies. Through this exercise, the study aims to shed light on the relevance of applying life cycle assessment and costing in the design and early (bio)technology development phases.

Extrapolation Factors for Characterizing Freshwater Ecotoxicity Effects.

Various environmental and chemical assessment frameworks including ecological risk assessment and life cycle impact assessment aim at evaluating long-term ecotoxicity effects. Chronic test data are reported under the European Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation for various chemicals. However, chronic data are missing for a large fraction of marketed chemicals, for which acute test results are often available. Utilizing acute data requires robust extrapolation factors across effect endpoints, exposure durations, and species groups. We propose a decision tree based on strict criteria for curating and selecting high-quality aquatic ecotoxicity information available in REACH for organic chemicals, to derive a consistent set of generic and species group-specific extrapolation factors. Where ecotoxicity effect data are not available at all, we alternatively provide extrapolations from octanol-water partitioning coefficients as suitable predictor for chemicals with nonpolar narcosis as mode of action. Extrapolation factors range from 0.2 to 7 and are higher when simultaneously extrapolating across effect endpoints and exposure durations. Our results are consistent with previously reported values, while considering more endpoints, providing species group-specific factors, and characterizing uncertainty. Our proposed decision tree can be adapted to curate information from additional data sources as well as data for other environments, such as sediment ecotoxicity. Our approach and robust extrapolation factors help to increase the substance coverage for characterizing ecotoxicity effects across chemical and environmental assessment frameworks. Environ Toxicol Chem 2019;38:2568-2582. © 2019 SETAC.

Valorisation of surplus food in the French retail sector: Environmental and economic impacts.

The retail sector, generating large amounts of food waste in a limited and well-defined number of locations, represents a unique opportunity for the implementation of waste minimisation policies targeting food waste and surplus food. France has introduced policy measures forcing retailers to prioritise the redistribution of surplus food to charity (donation) and/or diversion to animal feed. To evaluate the environmental benefits from such initiatives, this study provides a bottom-up consequential life cycle assessment of surplus food management at twenty retail outlets in France. A cradle-to-grave assessment was performed, including land-use changes, and the impacts were evaluated for ten impact categories. Four scenarios were considered, using monthly data on waste flows and management. Alongside assessing the current management (i.e. redistribution and/or use of surplus food for animal feed with anaerobic digestion and incineration of residual streams), three additional scenarios were evaluated: (i) prevention (used as benchmark), (ii) anaerobic digestion and (iii) incineration. The results demonstrated that redistribution leads to substantial environmental savings when accounting for all potentially induced benefits, second only to prevention but nevertheless of similar magnitude. Neither anaerobic digestion nor incineration can compete environmentally with redistribution and use as animal feed, especially in a low-carbon energy system. A cost analysis, including tax credits implemented in the French regulation, demonstrated that retailers donating high-value products also achieved lower costs and higher environmental savings overall. The results clearly suggest that similar initiatives should be encouraged, and the study offers a consistent basis for evaluating similar initiatives also for other countries.

Environmental impacts of food waste: Learnings and challenges from a case study on UK.

Food waste, particularly when avoidable, incurs loss of resources and considerable environmental impacts due to the multiple processes involved in the life cycle. This study applies a bottom-up life cycle assessment method to quantify the environmental impacts of the avoidable food waste generated by four sectors of the food supply chain in United Kingdom, namely processing, wholesale and retail, food service, and households. The impacts were quantified for ten environmental impact categories, from Global Warming to Water Depletion, including indirect land use change impacts due to demand for land. The Global Warming impact of the avoidable food waste was quantified between 2000 and 3600 kg CO2-eq. t-1. The range reflected the different compositions of the waste in each sector. Prominent contributors to the impact, across all the environmental categories assessed, were land use changes and food production. Food preparation, for households and food service sectors, also provided an important contribution to the Global Warming impacts, while waste management partly mitigated the overall impacts by incurring significant savings when landfilling was replaced with anaerobic digestion and incineration. To further improve these results, it is recommended to focus future efforts on providing improved data regarding the breakdown of specific food products within the mixed waste, indirect land use change effects, and the share of food waste undergoing cooking. Learning from this and previous studies, we highlight the challenges related to modelling and methodological choices. Particularly, food production datasets should be chosen and used carefully, to avoid double counting and overestimation of the final impacts.