Life-Cycle Costing of Food Waste Management in Denmark: Importance of Indirect Effects

Abstract

Prevention has been suggested as the preferred food waste management solution compared to alternatives such as conversion to animal fodder or to energy. In this study we used societal life-cycle costing, as a welfare economic assessment, and environmental life-cycle costing, as a financial assessment combined with life-cycle assessment, to evaluate food waste management. Both life-cycle costing assessments included direct and indirect effects. The latter are related to income effects, accounting for the marginal consumption induced when alternative scenarios lead to different household expenses, and the land-use-changes effect, associated with food production. The results highlighted that prevention, while providing the highest welfare gains as more services/goods could be consumed with the same income, could also incur the highest environmental impacts if the monetary savings from unpurchased food commodities were spent on goods/services with a more environmentally damaging production than that of the (prevented) food. This was not the case when savings were used, e.g., for health care, education, and insurances. This study demonstrates that income effects, although uncertain, should be included whenever alternative scenarios incur different financial costs. Furthermore, it highlights that food prevention measures should not only demote the purchase of unconsumed food but also promote a low-impact use of the savings generated.

Waste prevention for sustainable resource and waste management

“…Of course, there are many LCA studies focused on evaluating the prevention effects, as discussed later. It has often been pointed out that the environmental impact from the production of animal-based food (such as meat) is greater than that from vegetable food plant production [61,79,80,82]. Therefore, the composition of the food lost should be identified through waste composition surveys to quantify the effects generated from the reduction of food loss.…”

“…Martinez-Sanchez et al evaluated the environmental life-cycle costing (E-LCC) and societal life cycle costing (S-LCC) of four food waste management programs including the food waste prevention costs [82]. As show in Fig.…”

“…They showed that five uses of self-dispensing systems allowed lower waste Fig. 2 Results of E-LCC and S-LCC of food waste management by Martinez-Sanchez et al [82]. FU functional unit, GW global warming, POF photochemical ozone formation, NMVOC non-methane volatile organic carbon compound, IN incineration as MSW, CD codigestion with manure, AF animal fodder, PR prevention of 100% edible food waste, WMS waste management sector, iLUC indirect land-use change generation and environmental impacts than did single-use containers.…”

A Societal Life Cycle Costing of Energy Production: The Implications of Environmental Externalities

“…Few studies have applied the societal life cycle costing (LCC) method to determine the economic implication of environmental externalities in waste management [21]. The economic value of environmental externalities is traditionally estimated based on epidemiological studies, and the concept of life cycle costing has not been used to quantify externality.…”

A Methodology for Sustainable Management of Food Waste

“…Recent research aims to expand the scope and consider two or even all three pillars of sustainability implications mentioned above. Remarkable examples are work by Münster et al [7], Ahamed et al [8] and MartinezSanchez et al [9], who consider economic and environmental ramifications of food waste management.…”