The environmental impact of food and packaging waste can be evaluated and compared by ecological footprint analysis (EFA), which takes into account the amount of land needed to provide the resources to produce a product or measure a level of consumption (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996). In that study, water use was 19,800 m3/ha, based on average from different studies and reusage rate of 28%, thus rice is cultivated in flooded field and part of this water can be reused. The next feasible research steps go in complementary directions. If food waste were a country it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. The LCIA phase also provides information for the life cycle interpretation phase; according to ISO 14044 the LCIA consists of mandatory elements and optional elements. It can be seen that the single biggest ecological impact comes from the growing, harvesting, processing, storage, packaging, transporting, waste processing and disposal of food and drink. Significant work has been completed on development and application of sustainability indicators (Bell and Morse, 1999; Pintér et al., 2005). Top ten wasted foods in the UK by ecological impact, created by combining data from WRAP (2008) with the EF factors of Barrett et al. One of the approaches to reduce the environmental impacts of food is to optimize both the livestock and systems in which meat is produced. A greater understanding of the potential human health risks of backyard flocks, combined with information on management practices that optimize welfare are greatly needed to inform policymakers struggling with creating ordinances and legalizing backyard poultry. The Stockholm Environment Institute together with the University of York provided an EFA study performed in 2000 of the consumption characteristics of the population of 179,800 people living in the City of York, UK, where the level of detail is sufficient to extract the effects of food and packaging (Barrett et al., 2002). Data quality analysis is made to develop a better understanding of the reliability of the indicator results in the LCIA profile (analysis frequently adopted). The food intake was calculated according to apparent consumption in EU-28 (production+import–export) and food waste amounts along the food supply chain. To put things in context, if food packaging were a ten-storey building, food/ drink production would be a skyscraper more than 68 storeys tall, and food miles a building less than a storey high. It is also very challenging to interpret the results of a particular study to explore generic trends, because of the significant variations in mode and distances of transportation, agricultural practices, and the resource profile generating electricity and energy in different countries across the globe. Once such parameters are identified, sensitivity analyses can be developed for those parameters to estimate the variation in results due to different parameters in multiple geographical locations. The global food system is responsible for … However, ionizing radiation, water use, and mineral and metal resource use are lower with the average diet compared with alternative diet scenarios. over-packaging) exerts marginally higher environmental impacts, whereas a marginal decrease in packaging potentially leads to disastrous consequences, ranging from product damage to complete spoilage of the product [38]. This process involves associating inventory data with specific environmental impact categories and category indicators, thereby attempting to understand these impacts. In the next section, we describe a methodology to undertake a complete assessment of the food supply chain using sustainability indicators and applying it to a product sector level, rather than a firm level. Even with the existence of a number of life cycle packaging studies, utilising the specific results to interpret generic overarching trends is very challenging due to the variation in the key life cycle parameters governing the results. Furthermore, both species can also be a by-product of wool or dairy production. In fact, the average diet has the lowest or similar share of impacts with alternative diets due to the food waste in majority of the impact categories, except in water use impact. farm sustainability indicators (OECD, 2001). Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. Taija Sinkko, ... Serenella Sala, in Saving Food, 2019. It is estimated that more than 60% of the arable land is used for the production of animal feeds. The highest reduction can be achieved in land use, photochemical ozone formation, and freshwater ecotoxicity. At the fundamental level it involves estimating the potential risks in the future, contingent on the decisions made today. Also Eberle and Fels (2016) and Scherhaufer et al. Hence a direct environmental comparison, albeit rather crude, can be made between, say, throwing away a few slices of bread, and throwing away the empty plastic bag the bread was packaged in. Impacts at one node often depend on activities at other nodes, and improvement options for food industry might often involve changes that result in large savings at other nodes rather than for the industry’s own emissions. Share of the food waste impact from total impact of the food consumption in different studies. The data transformation from the inventory to the potential impact (EP (j)i) is made by multiplying input/output of a particular substance (Q) with an equivalent factor (characterization): EP(j)i=QxEQ(j)i. Many sustainability indicators target country or firm level of analysis. This phase consists of calculation of the magnitude of the results of the category indicators relative to reference information, in particular the results are divided with a “reference value” or “normal effect” to establish the magnitude of each effect compared to reference values.