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Life-cycle environmental impacts of barley straw valorisation - published.pdf (1.83 MB)

Life-cycle environmental impacts of barley straw valorisation

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-06-04, 08:42 authored by Guillermo Garcia-Garcia, Shahin RahimifardShahin Rahimifard
Most food manufacturers in industrialised countries produce significant amounts of food wastes during their manufacturing activities. Due to the serious environmental consequences of managing these materials, environmental impact analyses have become popular to identify more sustainable practices for food waste management. Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a useful methodology to assess such environmental impacts. This paper presents the main results obtained using the LCA methodology to analyse the potential environmental impacts of waste management for a brewery in the UK. Initially, the main waste types are identified for this industry: barley straw, malt waste and spent grain, and then barley straw is selected to study its environmental impact in detail. An alternative, more sustainable way to manage barley straw by extracting its wax with supercritical CO2 is discussed. SimaPro software is used to both quantify potential environmental impacts and evaluate the overall environmental performance of this valorisation opportunity, and to compare its modelled environmental impacts to the current impacts of managing barley straw. Results show that valorising barley straw by this method generates a high environmental impact due to the energy requirements of the processes involved, principally for human toxicity (cancer effects), human toxicity (non-cancer effects) and freshwater ecotoxicity impact categories. Using more energy-efficient processes or an alternative energy source would reduce this environmental impact. The analysis used in this paper allows an objective comparison between different scenarios with the final aim of supporting the use of sustainable solutions for waste management in the food industry.

Funding

The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [grant reference EP/ P008771/1].

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Resources, Conservation and Recycling

Volume

149

Pages

1 - 11

Citation

GARCIA-GARCIA, G. and RAHIMIFARD, S., 2019. Life-cycle environmental impacts of barley straw valorisation. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 149, pp. 1 - 11.

Publisher

Elsevier BV (© 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: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2019-05-22

Publication date

2019-05-27

Copyright date

2019

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

0921-3449

Language

  • en

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