Food and drink manufacturing: Establishing baseline contributions to climate change and identifying scope for reduction of environmental impacts
Project Lead
Challenges
Scotland’s food and drink manufacturing sector is an important contributor to the economy, accounting for 31% of the annual turnover of the manufacturing sector. Scotland’s reputation as a land of food and drink is largely driven by the production of high-quality healthy food.
However the positive messaging of Scotland's reputation must be maintained while delivering its ambitious climate change targets. The Scottish Government commits to reducing baseline greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 75% by 2030 and transitioning to net zero by 2045. Meeting these targets requires a coordinated approach across all sectors of society including the manufacturing of food and drink.
Food production generates GHG emissions and agriculture, and related land use, accounted for 24% of the total emissions in 2017, down 29% from the baseline levels of 1990. An update to the Scottish climate change plan has accelerated the drive to net zero and will require transformation across all sectors of society including the food and drink manufacturing sector. This includes transforming the agricultural/food production system and building a greater understanding of the environmental impact of practices associated with the manufacture and distribution of food and drink products.
Questions
- What is the scope for reducing the environmental impact of Scotland’s food and drink manufacturing processes?
- What baseline data is needed to show Scottish food and drink manufacturing's contribution to climate change and how will this new data be collected?
Solutions
The purpose of this project is to build a greater understanding of the environmental impact of practices associated with the manufacture and distribution of food and drink products. To do this, we will estimate and monitor baseline GHG emissions, energy usage, inputs as well as the generation of waste in crop and livestock-based manufacturing and processing supply chains. This will provide a benchmark and means to underpin future monitoring and help identify sectors where there is a scope for further reduction in environmental impacts either through the adoption of low-emission technologies, reduction of inputs, the prevention and valorisation of waste or a combination of all three.
Product quality data from dairy and beef production
The first part of this project is collating and collecting product quality data from dairy, beef, and beef cross-dairy production. Currently, beef system efficiency is driven by abattoirs closely specifying the carcass characteristics of supplied cattle. This leads to large sires (for example, Belgian Blue) being used to mate with small dairy cows (for example, Jersey cross Holsteins) to create a calf that meets that market requirement. This neither addresses product quality nor potential welfare image concerns. There may be better alternatives if consumers’ reactions to the meat-eating qualities of these alternatives are known and can be exploited in a specialised supply chain. We use exemplar data to generate carcases for testing and for analysis to determine relationships between meat-eating qualities and other animal and farm characteristics.
Estimating the impacts of processing pathways
The second part is estimating the impacts of processing pathways. GHG emissions can vary widely across different products and production methods in the global food and drink industry. Using existing baseline data for agricultural and seafood production output, we are developing modelled scenarios exploring four major processing pathways within Scotland. This is being done by combining industry data, and data from the literature to address the areas of crop and seafood processing.
Case Study: reduction in the environmental impact of malting
The final part takes advantage of our interactions with the malting industry to answer questions of GHG emissions and energy usage associated with the reuse of steep water and in particular what gains could be made using different barley lines to reduce the environmental footprint in terms of water and energy use.
Overall, the main audience for this project is the food and drink manufacturing sector and is providing them with further insights on benchmarking GHG emissions and energy use and a means to underpin future monitoring.
Project Partners
Progress
Livestock based food supply chains
Engagement across the farming/industry sectors during the year has identified cohorts of dairy, beef and dairy-beef calves from key industry cohorts. The scale of this has been impressive with 20,000 cow and calf liveweight records having been assimilated from 4 commercial herds and more added each quarter (2338 - Q2 and 4067 - Q3). For these and with the more recent engagement with major meat processors in Scotland, and England for UK context and comparison, data is being collected on the animals and the processing data to allow 'what-does-good-look-like' to be determined for the associated meat and dairy industries. Data collected is being developed into a database with data per animal/carcass on weight, intake (efficiency) etc that will allow both end use-suitability and sustainability to be calculated. For example, the balance between mature cow size and its effect on productivity and GHG emissions can be modelled, feeding back to animal management, breeding and food systems sustainability measures.
Crop-based food supply chains
The data has been acquired and the difficult task of teasing out the Scottish data from aggregated UK processed food figures has begun. At the national level the food and drink processing sector has been found to have the following major categories: Meat, dairy, seafood, animal feed, vegetables, cereals, distilling, brewing, soft drink manufacture, bakery and sweets manufacture. Meat, dairy, seafood and sweets processing has been removed from consideration due to the focus of the work package; bakery processing was also removed due to its nature as a 'secondary' processing stage. Of the remaining categories the Scottish examples of each processing type were targeted, and literature searches undertaken, with a database being created to determine the state of knowledge regarding life cycle analysis (LCA) and environmental impacts of each sector and subcategories within (e.g., potato chip manufacture) to identify knowledge gaps. From this key processing areas of interest have been, and continue to be, identified to allow for data collection and model creation to explore environmental impacts. As part of this, a process on engagement with the key sectors across Scotland has been undertaken.
Reduction of environmental impact in malting
This first year has seen a significant level of industry collaboration to deliver the milestones and deliverables for this work package. The collection of industrial data, around (steep) water use and factors impacting barley germination and malt production have been completed in collation with the Maltsters' Association of Great Britain. Allied to these, transcriptomic analyses of a range of critical stages during steeping and germination during malting to allow the genetic dissection of the malting process is ongoing. This will facilitate the analysis of the relationships of gene expression(s) with the critical parameters of germination speed and water use during malting.
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