Energy flows and greenhouses gases of EU (European Union) national breads using an LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) approach

Bread represents a staple food in many parts of the world including Europe. Depending on the region of origin and the respective cultural heritage bread is made with different ingredients and is consumed in various forms. This work consists of an environmental sustainability assessment of 21 different types of bread, representing a wide spectrum of typologies of such food consumed across the European Union, via a Life Cycle Assessment approach. The embedded energy and equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of each type of bread were estimated, from cradle to bakery gate, by considering a mass, a nutritional value and a price based functional unit. Overall, the results have highlighted the variability of the embedded energy and the equivalent GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions associated to the consumption of the 21 kinds of bread rooted in the cultural environment of 21 EU countries. When considering a functional unit of 1 kg of bread, the Cumulative Energy Demand results range from 9 MJ/kg to 32.9 MJ/kg. The Global Warming Potential indicator has a minimum value of 0.5 kgCO2eq/kg and a maximum of 6.6 kgCO2eq/kg. For a functional unit amounting to a 100 kcal provided by the consumption of bread, the Cumulative Energy Demand results vary from 0.33 MJ/100 kcal to 0.93 MJ/100 kcal whilst the Global Warming Potential indicator varies from 0.019 kgCO2eq/100 kcal to 0.135 kgCO2eq/100 kcal. For a functional unit amounting to the quantity of bread purchased with 1V (weighted according to the purchasing price of each nation in the European Union), the Cumulative Energy Demand results vary from 1.197 MJ/V to 3.708 MJ/V whilst the Global Warming Potential indicator varies from 0.15 kgCO2eq/V to 0.376 kgCO2eq/ V. The study has pinpointed the importance of evaluating food, in terms of environmental sustainability, with more than one type of functional unit in order to account not only for the bread's nutritional purposes but also the need to satisfy social, cultural, hedonistic and other qualitative functions. Specifically, when ...