Embodied energy in preventable food manufacturing waste in the United Kingdom
Phil Sheppard
Shahin Rahimifard
2134/37437
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Embodied_energy_in_preventable_food_manufacturing_waste_in_the_United_Kingdom/9560360
The food processing and manufacturing industry is the UK’s largest manufacturing sector and
consequently a large consumer of natural resources and source of environmental impacts.
Considerable research effort has been made to quantify and characterise food waste and
energy consumption from the industry, enabling the sector to set targets for reductions which
contribute to national targets and the UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, and to identify
improvement measures to meet the targets. A gap in this research is a detailed estimation of
the energy consumption which could automatically be avoided through preventing food
waste in food manufacturing. This paper reports research which estimates the energy
embodied in preventable manufacturing food waste in the UK using available data for 2014.
Whilst the estimate of 106 GWh per year is a tiny proportion of the industry’s annual energy
consumption, it is 1.75 percentage points of the main 20% energy efficiency improvement
target and over half the contribution expected from energy management measures to
improve energy efficiency. Preventing food waste in the factory could therefore also
contribute significantly to energy efficiency and climate change targets with no extra effort.
2019-04-04 12:23:05
Food manufacturing
Food waste
Industrial energy efficiency
Embodied energy
Energy management
Mechanical Engineering not elsewhere classified