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In the past decades, food consumption in China has undergone a rapid increase and a significant structure transition, as a result of population growth and economic development. The food system is increasingly threatening the environment by depleting water resources, deteriorating water bodies, aggravating climate change, degrading ecosystems, etc. It is significant to understand how food consumption affected the environment and how its impacts were driven in the historical period. This study reveals the environmental impacts of China’s food system from 1961 to 2017 from a consumption perspective by assessing water, carbon, and ecological footprints. The logarithmic mean Divisia index method was used to examine the drivers of the growing environmental footprints. The assessment results show that all three environmental footprints have had a drastic increase of more than two times during the studied period, which indicates the high environmental pressure posed by food consumption. We also found that, before the 1980s, the main driving forces of the increasing footprints were population and per capita energy intake. From 1984, the diet pattern started to take a positive effect and then became the dominant driver of the growing environmental footprints after the end of the 1990s.

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In the present study, the biomass upgrading depot capacity and biomass feedstock moisture were optimized to obtain the minimum production cost at the depot gate for the production of woody biofuels. Three technology scenarios are considered in this study: 1) conventional pellets (CP), 2) modestly torrefied pellets (TP1) and severely torrefied pellets (TP2). TP1 has the lowest cost of $7.03 /GJ LHV at a moisture of 33 wt.% and a depot size of 84 MW LHV. The effects of climatic conditions and biomass field conditions were also studied for three scenarios. In humid regions of Michigan, TP2 is more economical than other scenarios because of the increased production of combustible gas. The three scenarios have similar sensitivities to biomass field conditions.

The change in diet structure is one of the critical features of social transformation, and diet structure is directly related to human health. In China, with rapid economic development, changes in the diet structure of the population have begun and are proceeding at a fairly rapid rate. In order to reveal how the Chinese diet is approaching or deviating from the nutritional goal, a novel index, NDBI (National Dietary Balance Index), is developed in this study to investigate the Chinese diet from 1961 to 2017 at a national level. The results show that the Chinese diet has transitioned from the under-intake stage to the over-intake stage. Before the 1980s, Chinese people ate all foods inadequately except staple foods; after the 1980s, the issue of under-intake began to fade, and the intake of meats even became excessive. The intake of staple foods is always excessive during this period. Currently, the Chinese diet is still unhealthy because of the inadequate intake of dairy products and the excessive intake of staple foods and meats. By evaluating diet structure on a national level, this study can help people to better understand how the Chinese diet deviated from the nutritional goal and provides information for policymakers intervening in China’s food consumption.