Energy and environmental assessment of the institutional catering in Lombardy (Italy)

Abstract

Climate change calls for decisive actions to match sustainable development goals, among which key factors are the reduction of energy consumption and carbon footprint. Agri-food sector is one of the main priority areas contained in the European Sustainable Production and Consumption policies, aiming to create more sustainable consumption and production patterns and pushing for environmental international agreements for climate change mitigation and national laws for the efficient use of resources. Public restoration plays a central role in the food consumption sector, at least in developed countries. In particular, institutional catering is playing a relevant role in outdoor meals provided in schools, hospitals, prisons and senior housings, significantly affecting the local food sector. On average in Italy one third of the total meals provided by institutional catering are supplied in schools, where 380 millions of daily meals per year are provided. This consumption is constantly increasing at least in the North/Center Italy. Thus, it becomes of crucial importance to assess the environmental impacts along the production chain, from the cultivation phase, the food processing and the distribution phase to the end-of-life. At international level, it is well recognized that an integrated sustainability assessment must be based on a life cycle approach, that allows to deeply analyse the whole system or supply chain, thus avoiding burden shifting. The presented paper starts from the results of a previous research, in which a tool was developed to evaluate the impacts of food production and to define possible scenarios to improve institutional catering in the school sector in Lombardy Region. The paper here presented reports the further developments of the previous research in order to verify the robustness of the architecture and of the dataset and to make the tool able to assess institutional catering also in terms of environmental effects. In details, the CED (Cumulative Energy Demand) and the GWP (Global Warming Potential) are investigated in depth for the selected food products, according to a life-cycle approach. Particular attention is paid in relation to the sources considered and to the boundary of the analyses, following the scheme of upstream, core and downstream processes for the food chain taken into account. Further improved institutional catering scenarios are defined taking into account both the production and consumption systems and assessing the main energy and environmental items. The authors hope that their contribution could provide a systemic approach of energy and environmental assessment for the stakeholders involved in the institutional catering sector, in order to support the development of new models of food policy.