Study On The Household Food Waste And Its Ecological Footprint, Carbon Footprint, Water Footprint And Methane Emission

Along with the production, processing, storage, transportation and consumption of food, huge amounts of water and land resources would be consumed, a great deal of greenhouse gas would be emitted. Moreover, food wastage phenomenon is increasingly serious at present, generating large amounts of food waste. In the period of resource shortage and food wastage, it is of great significance to analyzethe environment impacts of food waste. Based on the data of China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), this study calculated the amount of food waste in nine representative provinces in China. Meanwhile, the environmental impacts of food waste were quantified via four parameters including the ecological footprint, carbon footprint, water footprint of the life cycle before final disposal and the methane emission after landfill disposal.The CHNS data regarding the food wastage of 5557 families from nine provinces in 7 seven years was utilized and 1581 kinds of food were classified into 27 categories for calculation. The results show that the food waste per capita each year is 16 kg. Among these provinces, Hubei province ranks the first and the maximal food waste per capita arrives up to 38.6 kg/a, while the food waste per capita of Heilongjiang Province is the least of 13.8 kg/a.Monte Carlo analysis method was applied to analyze and calculate the potential of the ecological footprint, carbon footprint and water footprint of different food wastage categories. The resultsimply that the maximal carbon footprint waste, water footprint waste and ecological footprint waste are obtained from Guangxi, Liaoning and Hunan province respectively. Food waste and footprint waste have no obvious correlation, which is attributed to the different compositions of the food wastage in each province. Taking meat and vegetables as the example, the potential carbon footprint of meat is much larger than vegetables, thus making the carbon footprint waste comparatively higher in the provinces with more meat consumption.On the basis of domestic existing researches and the data of food wastage in each province, and by applying the Buswell-Mualler formula, the theoretical methane emission of food waste in the landfilling processwas calculated under the assumption of the complete fermentation of food waste. The results indicate that 0.34 kg methane will be generated if 1 kg food waste is completely fermented.Above all, through the research on food wastage in nine representative provinces in China, this paper quantified the environmental impactsof food waste and the methane emission after landfill disposal. The major food waste category was determined so that the policies and guidelines could be made to reduce the related waste and environmental impacts.