Energy and environmental assessment of the institutional catering in Lombardy (Italy)

Climate change calls for decisive actions to match sustainable development goals, among which key factors are the reduction of energy consumption and carbon footprint. Agri-food sector is one of the main priority areas contained in the European Sustainable Production and Consumption policies, aiming to create more sustainable consumption and production patterns and pushing for environmental international agreements for climate change mitigation and national laws for the efficient use of resources. Public restoration plays a central role in the food consumption sector, at least in developed countries. In particular, institutional catering is playing a relevant role in outdoor meals provided in schools, hospitals, prisons and senior housings, significantly affecting the local food sector. Thus, in order to achieve the goal of the sustainable production and consumption, it becomes of crucial importance to assess the environmental impacts along the food production chain. At international level, it is well recognized that an integrated sustainability assessment must be based on a life cycle approach that allows for deeply analysing the whole system or supply chain, thus avoiding burden shifting. The presented paper starts from the results of a previous research, in which a tool was developed to evaluate the impacts of food production and to define possible scenarios to improve institutional catering in the school sector in Lombardy Region. This paper reports the further developments of the previous research in order to verify the robustness of the architecture and of the dataset and to make the tool able to assess institutional catering also in terms of environmental effects. In detail, the Global Energy Requirement and the Global Warming Potential are investigated in depth for the selected food products, according to a life-cycle approach. Further improved institutional catering scenarios are defined taking into account both the production and consumption systems.