Evaluating the Impacts of Sourcing Food Waste as a Raw Material for Production

This project is a group project which leads to the acquisition of the degree of Master of Environmental Science and Management for the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara.

The concept of “circular economy” has recently gained traction as a way to help companies become more sustainable. Circular economy suggests that environmental impacts can be reduced by sourcing wastes rather than virgin materials. However, this claim remains largely untested. This project works with Apeel Sciences, a small biotechnology startup interested in sourcing food waste as an input to their product, to evaluate the environmental impacts of sourcing waste using two different Life Cycle Assessment methodologies, economic allocation and substitution. We show that economic allocation may not capture impacts outside the immediate system of interest, which we demonstrate can be as large if not larger than those generated by the immediate system. This is particularly true when the “waste” under consideration is not truly a waste and has another established use. Therefore, using different methodologies results in different recommendations of what to source based on environmental impacts, highlighting that sourcing wastes may not be as sustainable as originally thought. We distill these findings into a comprehensive framework that allows companies to replicate our analysis and develop a more holistic understanding of the environmental impacts of sourcing a waste.

See the final report for more info.