Applicability of Carbon Footprint as Indicator for Environmental Performance of Food Products

In the past decades, the environmental impact categories have been applied to life cycle assessment of consumer product, but the challenge of applying the impact categories is still posed. Although former studies have screened impact categories/indicators to represent sustainability for environmental performance of products from the existing ones, the practitioners have rarely discussed the challenge within food products. This present study aims to conduct a correlation analysis between life cycle impacts of food products on eight impact categories/indicators with a question of whether Carbon Footprint (CF) expressed as Global Warming Potential (GWP100a) could serve as indicator for environmental performance of food products. 1548 food products from the French database AGRIBALYSE v3.0.1 is employed in the analysis, while eight impact categories/indicators in the CML-IA baseline method are calculated by the openLCA 1.10.3 software. The results show that correlation coefficients between the impact categories/indicators vary in a range of 0.42–0.87. Strong correlations between the CF and the others are found in the whole product category except toxicity-related impact categories, and the correlations could be stronger or weaker depending on the product subcategories. It reveals that, on one hand, the CF could act as proxy for some of the impact indicators in the product categories; on the other hand, the indicator could not serve as a stand-alone indicator to represent the environmental sustainability. The research findings might be used in selecting impact categories/indicators for environmental performance of food products, while screening impact categories/indicators from the existing ones and making a contribution to sustainability assessment.

Graphical Abstract