PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
The food and drink industry is a major contributor to the overall pollution load in Europe. The sector is a major energy (10-15% of total energy in industrialised countries) and water (8% of all water used by the industrial sector) user. A 2006 UK government report on “Environmental Impacts of Food Production and Consumption” indicated that dairy products have the second highest environmental impact in the sector, with milk, cheese and butter contributing up to 4% of the global warming potential of consumption, and up to 13% to eutrophication.
Within the dairy industry supply chain, dairy farming produces the most greenhouse gas emissions. However, according to a recent United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation study, up to 55% of the total environmental impacts of dairy products come from the processing stage. The main challenges that dairy processing plants face are water consumption, effluent discharge, energy consumption and emissions.
Meanwhile, consumers and stakeholders are putting an increased focus on the environment. In this regard, the European Commission developed the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) as a single metric to assess and benchmark the environmental performance of products. To make PEF studies more consistent, technical guidance for specific product categories, or Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCRs) have been developed. However, application of the PEF methodology is often too complex for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The European Commission has identified some key actions to tackle this: provide tools to support SMEs and make sure that PEFCRs represent a simplification of the application of PEF.
OBJECTIVES
Life-RENDER will develop and demonstrate an innovative decision-support tool that will help SMEs in the food and drink sector to carry out PEFCR-compliant studies and to identify focused environmental measures. The project would promote the implementation of the PEF methodology at European level as a key tool to assess life-cycle environmental performance of products, and to communicate them to business consumers and stakeholders. The tool would be usable by non-experts through simplified data collection and analysis processes.
The project’s specific objectives were to:
- Demonstrate an easy-to-use and easy-to-understand software tool for dairy sector SMEs to carry out PEFCR-compliant studies as a basis for reducing environmental impacts, in particular by minimising energy and water consumption, minimising waste and optimising the use of raw materials. This tool will be the first of its kind for the dairy sector;
- Demonstrate the tool by assessing the environmental footprints of 30 dairy products in France and by implementing measures identified by the software application to reduce the environmental footprint of six dairy products;
- Demonstrate the transferability to other Member States of the tools through replication tests in dairy companies in Spain and Portugal;
- Improve the competitiveness of the EU dairy sector by reducing production costs and improving environmental performance; and
- Implement awareness-raising strategies aimed at consumers and stakeholders to increase their familiarity and understanding of PEF.
RESULTS
The LIFE-RENDER project demonstrated under real conditions the technical, environmental and economic feasibility of an innovative tool for determining the environmental footprints of products (PEFs) and the rules for their categorisation. The tool, which is aimed at SMEs in the food and drink sector, also helps identify environmental measures.
The project team also carried out a series of studies on products, identifying eight measures for lowering their environmental impacts. However, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic prevented the beneficiary from implementing these measures itself; it therefore cooperated with another dairy company on the demonstration of seven measures that were shown to have environmental and economic benefit.
To ensure the replicability of the project tool in other Member States, a training course on the environmental performance of dairy businesses, along with the tool itself, was made available to federations and associations that signed up to a memorandum of understanding.
Further information on the project can be found in the project's layman report and After-LIFE Communication Plan (see "Read more" section).
