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Embodied energy in preventable food manufacturing waste in the United Kingdom
journal contribution
posted on 2019-04-04, 12:23 authored by Phil Sheppard, Shahin RahimifardShahin RahimifardThe 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.
Funding
This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant number EP/K030957/1), the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Food.
History
School
- Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Published in
Resources, Conservation and RecyclingCitation
SHEPPARD, P. and RAHIMIFARD, S., 2019. Embodied energy in preventable food manufacturing waste in the United Kingdom. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 146, pp.549-559Publisher
Elsevier (© the authors)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2019-03-05Publication date
2019-04-24Notes
This paper was published by Elsevier as Open Access under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/).ISSN
0921-3449Publisher version
Language
- en