Restaurant and food service life cycle assessment英文书.pdf

Int J LCA (2009) 13:1–10 DOI 10.1007/ LIFE CYCLE MANAGEMENT Restaurant and Food Service Life Cycle Assessment and Development of a Sustainability Standard Cheryl Baldwin1, Nana Wilberforce1, Amit Kapur1 Abstract Purpose: Since there is no clear guidance for responsible food service operations to reduce their environmental footprint, the efforts put forth by a restaurant may not have the environmental impact intended. As a result, Green Seal conducted life cycle assessment (LCA) research on restaurants and food service operations to define priorities of environmental improvement. This information was then used to develop a sustainability standard and certification (i.e., ecolabel) program. Methods The life cycle assessment study focused on the day-to-day activities of running a restaurant, including direct and indirect contributions. To do this, a restaurant and food service operations model was developed by grouping the operational activities into four subsystems: food procurement, food storage, food preparation and cooking, and service/support. Data was collected from a range of restaurants in the United States. The impact categories examined included respiratory inorganics, acidification/eutrophication, fossil fuels, ecotoxicity, carcinogens, land use and climate change. Results and Discussion: Of all the subsystems, food procurement contributed hotspots in all impact categories examined. On the contrary the food storage subsystem contributed no hotspot in any of the impact categories examined. Normalization of the results confirmed that food procurement was the largest source of environmental impacts. In addition, it was found that the impacts of food services were dominated by land use, respiratory inorganics, and fossil fuels. The impacts could be reduced with various preferable practices. As a result, a sustainability standard for restaurants and food services was developed to include these preferable practices, the Green Seal Standard for Food Services, GS-46