Working with Esma Birisci, a doctoral candidate in the industrial and manufacturing systems engineering department, McGarvey analyzed the carbon emissions of three common food items, French fries, chicken sandwiches, and beef ravioli.
The environmental and monetary costs of throwing away beef ravioli were up to 39 times more than throwing away French fries.
“Farm equipment used to feed and maintain livestock and to plant and harvest crops uses a lot of diesel fuel and other utilities from fossil fuels,” McGarvey says. “When people waste food, these fuels, as well as fertilizers, also are wasted.”
Based on their estimates, the team developed a production planning formula taking into account the resources used to produce the food that is more accurate and provides a better picture of food waste.
Food-service managers should estimate how much food to cook with an emphasis on producing more vegetables than meat. These kinds of calculations will help keep food waste at a minimum while lessening the environmental impact.
“Institutional food-service providers face a common planning problem—how much food to produce in the presence of uncertain demand,” McGarvey says. "However, there is growing awareness of the environmental costs associated with food waste.
“Employing this new formula we’ve developed may incentivize AYCTE managers to calculate the environmental costs associated with their production decisions thereby reducing the environmental impact of food waste.”
Future research will aim to develop software tools to help food service managers with production and inventory ordering decisions. The findings appear in the International Journal of Production Economics.
Source: University of Missouri
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