PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
From farm to fork, the food system is responsible for many kinds of environmental pressures, including greenhouse gas emissions, use of chemicals resulting in water, soil and air pollution, waste generated by packaging, etc. Today in Europe, agriculture accounts for about 11% of total greenhouse gas emissions, 90% of ammonia emissions and between 50 and 80% of the total nitrogen load entering Europe’s freshwater ecosystems. It also creates pressure on soils and biodiversity, and creates waste from single-use food packaging.
On the other hand, agriculture can also positively impact the environment and is a sector crucial to reaching European Union environment and climate objectives through carbon storage, maintenance of species-rich semi-natural habitats, etc.
Therefore, achieving the Green Deal objectives – not only for a fair, healthy, and environmentally friendly food system, but also achieving the zero-pollution ambition, preserving and restoring ecosystems and biodiversity and increasing the EU climate ambition – will only be possible with an ambitious transformation of the food system.
Informing the consumer about the sustainability of food products is a key driver to transforming the food system but the task is extremely complex due to multiplicity of environmental impacts of the food system.
The environmental issues posed by the food system are also closely linked with health issues. As stated in the Farm to Fork Strategy, if European diets shifted towards current dietary recommendations, the environmental footprint of the food system would also be significantly reduced. Environmental and health objectives thus go hand in hand regarding the transition of the food system.
In this context, providing clear and reliable information to European consumers on the sustainability of food products is central to fostering changes to consumers’ diets, and hence to transforming the food system and reducing its environmental impacts.
OBJECTIVES
The general objective of the LIFE ECO FOOD CHOICE project is to share knowledge and experiences at the EU level, and to develop and test new methodologies for life cycle inventories and environmental scores on food, as well as a labelling scheme. The project is led by nine organisations from four EU countries aiming to be front-runners on food environmental data and labelling in the EU - France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain - and its results will enable the further development in each country of national and regional databases, as well as environmental-impact labelling schemes for food.
The specific objectives of the project are to:
Develop a harmonised methodology for life cycle inventory in Europe, taking into account the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology.
Develop a harmonised methodology for aggregating the life cycle assessment scores and complementing them to calculate a food environmental score (E-score), and a classification scheme.
Develop pilots which will be organised in laboratories, supermarkets and canteens in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, and aim to reach 56,300 European consumers.
Create conditions and initiate actions to ensure that the initiative will be upscaled and replicated at the EU level.
Communicate on project results and disseminate lessons learned to relevant actors and public authorities to feed European and national policies.
RESULTS
The project’s expected results are:
A harmonised methodology for life cycle inventory modelling and guidelines on data collection and data quality to build compatible national life cycle inventory datasets and databases for food product ecolabeling.
An enabling of economies of scale for databases and methodology development by providing guidelines on how to nationally adapt life cycle data from other countries or regions.
Guidelines for extrapolation of the French Agribalyse datasets.
A method aligned with the PEF but also complementing it, calculating an environmental score (E-score) for a number of food product categories, to enable comparison between product categories and encourage dietary shifts in the EU.
A label format and visual which will be tested and validated in real conditions with consumers and farmers.
