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Faculty Advisor

Dr. Christie Klimas

Abstract

Food waste contributes to climate change because discarded food results in wasting embodied carbon from producing food. In addition to wasting embodied carbon, food that ends up in landfills emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. This life cycle assessment quantifies the carbon equivalent footprint of food donations from Costco to the Seton Soup Kitchen using OpenLCA. Two functional units were analyzed in this study. The first functional unit is one meal consisting of 500 grams of donated food that would otherwise be landfilled served to a Seton Soup Kitchen patron during one meal service. The second functional unit is one gram of edible donated food, diverted from a landfill over the span of six months. System boundaries included cradle-to-sale impacts, which are agricultural production, processing, and packaging. Results show that seafood had the highest global warming impact per gram, and chicken had the highest total global warming impact because of its high donation volume. Grains had higher global warming impacts than fruits and vegetables due to intensive processing, and variations among fruits and vegetables are due to processing and packaging. There are uncertainties in this study due to limited LCA data for certain foods, but these findings help provide the Seton Soup Kitchen with environmental data it can use for grants and donors.

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