NDLI: Comparing apples with oranges: on the functional equivalence of food products for comparative LCAs

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Tyszler, Marcelo Kramer, Gerard Blonk, Hans
Copyright Year	2014
Abstract	In this article, we present an innovative way of deriving comparable functional systems for comparative life cycle assessments (LCAs) of food products. We define the functional unit as the contribution of one or more foods to the nutrient composition of a weekly diet and, after a product substitution, employ a product system expansion approach to search for an alternative set of products which provides an equivalent nutritional composition.Replacement is regarded within the context of a weekly diet. The comparable diet is a solution to a linear problem which finds the diet that is most similar to the starting one, subject to nutritional and/or other constraints that guarantee a minimum dietary quality. The formulation gives priority to selecting food products according to popularity.We illustrate our method with two examples. We show that a baseline diet containing 3.6 servings of apples a week is equivalent to a similar diet in which the apples are replaced with 3.6 servings of oranges and servings of strawberry and kiwi are removed. These changes are necessary mainly because of differences in the vitamin C content between apples and oranges. The second example is a replacement of all meat in a weekly diet by a soy-based meat substitute. In this case, additional fish products need to be consumed to make up for a lack of selenium and essential amino acids.We present an innovative and objective way to overcome the challenge of comparing two or more food products in a comparative LCA. Our approach is systematic and finds the alternative diet that best meets the nutritional criteria as well as reflecting the food preferences of the population. The method selects products according to the role they play in the dietary pattern. Moreover, the method is flexible enough to allow for different selection criteria and other nutritional and non-nutritional constraints.
Starting Page	1482
Ending Page	1487
Page Count	6
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09483349
Journal	The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment
Volume Number	19
Issue Number	8
e-ISSN	16147502
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publisher Date	2014-06-05
Publisher Place	Berlin, Heidelberg
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Comparative LCA Food LCA Linear programming Optimization System expansion Functional unit Environment Environmental Economics Environmental Engineering/Biotechnology Environmental Chemistry
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Environmental Science

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
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3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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