Food Life Cycle Assessment And Its Application

The fast development of industry civilization satisfied people's living re-quirement, while its environmental pollution caused a series ecosystem crisis. Forthis, all over the world look for the technical methods and management systems toachieve human's sustainable development. Life cycle assessment (LCA) was de-veloped accordingly. It is a tool which quantitatively analyzes and qualitativelyvaluates the environmental impact of a product, process or activity throughout itsentire life cycle. It can distinguish and quantify this impact through utilization ofsubstances and environmental wastes. The purpose is to valuate environmental im-pact of these factors and search for a chance to improve. The LCA methodologyhas been gradually improved by practice in thirty years. In 1993, the LCA had beenincluded in the IS014000 series standards and became an important support tool forthe environmental management and product design. Now, LCA has been applied inmany fields, and obtains a lot of results.As an important part of industrial system, food industry is also needed toachieve its sustainable development by low depletion, low emission and high effi-ciency. Cleaner production is recognized as a most effective way for this, it useswhole preventive strategy in the production line, product and the service process,for increasing the ecosystem efficiency and reducing the emissions to environment.LCA is the best method to support it without doubt.This paper introduces LCA into food industry according the related contentsof ISO140140, researches these problems and gets some conclusions:1) A method system of food life cycle assessment was builtAccording the related contents of ISO140140,food LCA can be developed byfour steps:Goal and Scoping Definition: The first step of food LCA is delineating thegoal and scoping, it can be adjusted with different goals and practice.Inventory Analysis: In this step, the input and output of every material, energyand every kind of emissions are all quantified. It is the beginning of life cycleevaluation and is a key section.Impact Assessment: Based on the LCIA, the system and process's influencedegree by every kinds of input and output is quantified. Influence evaluation can beclassified into three steps, denoted as classification, characterization and evaluation.The character model mentioned in this paper was equivalent model.Improvement Assessment: Find out the problems and look for the opportuni-ties to reduce the energy, resources consuming and emissions.2) Demonstration researchA case study of beer production was performed, the product studied was acommon brand produced by HARBIN Brewing (CHANGCHUN YINPU) Co.Lld,which was marketed in 0.63L green glass bottle. And the system was divided intosix subsystems, including beer brewing, waste lees desiccation, waste yeast desic-cation, CO2 reuse, steam production and refrigeration.The results showed that the whole evaluation value of this system is 0.168,and the main potential environmental factor influence order were eutrophication(0.085), global warming (0.046), dust (0.029), acidification (0.016) and solidwastes (0.003).The main subsystems to eutrophication were beer brewing, steam production,waste lees desiccation, and the main influence substances were organic waste waterand the waste gas which has N element;global warming and acidification were re-sulted mainly in the waste gas by coal burning in steam production;dust wasmainly from materiel crushing in the subsystems of brewing and waste lees desic-cation;solid wastes were mainly the waste kieselguhr brought by beer filtration inbrewing subsystem.The impact categories were mostly affected by the brewing, steam production,refrigeration, waste lees desiccation, CO2 reuse and waste yeast desiccation, thepercentages were 49%, 44%, 3%, 2%, 1%, 1% respectively.The resource exhaustibility count f coal was higher than water. Brewing wasthe main subsystem of consuming water using in brewing and washing, it was animportant way to save water by reducing the washing water. Brewing and refrig-eration consumed the most energy, the percentages are 44.4%, 42.9%, and theyconsumed mainly by steam and electricity.According to the results of evaluation, some measures were advanced:① Reuse the secondary steam;② Put the CIP system in practice generally;③ Choose the high quality coal, improve the boiler's efficiency synchro-nously;④ Change the way of material crushing from dry crushing to wet crushing;⑤ Adopt a technology and equipment to reuse the waste kieselguhr;⑥ Improve the management level of refrigeration plant, prevent the leakingof NH3.3) A model to evaluate the beer production environmental performance wasbuilt which based on LCA.According to the results of LCA, the indicator system of beer production en-vironmental performance was established, and a fuzzy synthetic evaluation modelto evaluate it was built which based on AHP. Take the performance of July andAugust as a case study, the study showed that the levels of these two months wereall the secondly, the scores were 86.96, 84.57 respectively. The result reflected thefact of production factually, it showed that this model had a simple method, credi-ble result and some practicability.4) Some measures and suggestions were advanced for cleaner productionbased on food LCA.It was discussed that how to use LCA's theory and method to achieve foodcleaner production. Some problems of developing this method were analyzed, andthe measures were advanced relevantly.The food LCA model and these conclusions of this paper can give a model forenterprises to develop relevant study, and give some new ideas and methods forcleaner production, improve the level of production and management, achieve thesustainable development.Totally, food LCA was developed at beginning in China, it was at primarystage on study field, and at groping stage on application. So there are many worksfor us to study deeply.