Urged by the importance of resource efficiency and circular economy agenda of EU and national policy makers, many stakeholders are seeking alternatives for current surplus food or side flows within the food supply chain. Any new valorisation route for side flows (i.e. not the main product) will be associated with impacts (monetary and environmental). To allow informed decision making at all levels, from individual stakeholder to policy level, robust, consistent and science based approaches are required. The EU H2020 funded project REFRESH (Resource Efficient Food and dRink for the Entire Supply cHain) aims to contribute to food waste reduction throughout the food supply chain, and evaluate the environmental impacts and life cycle costs.

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) are well documented and generic approaches for assessing the environmental and cost dimensions of a system. Both LCA and LCC are characterised by allowing for a large flexibility in system scoping. To allow for comparison between different options consistent approaches are required. Furthermore, there is a need to bridge the gap between assessors who might have a deep knowledge of the systems they are assessing, but are not in depth method experts on LCA or LCC. Highlighting challenging methodological aspects and encouraging the practitioner to ask the most relevant questions contributes to a better scoping practice of LCA and LCCs.

The objective of this study was to develop a consistent approach, combining LCA and LCA specifically to assess impacts of prevention of resource inefficiencies, valorisation routes and waste handling in the food supply chain. The recommendations build on existing standards and state-of-the-art LCA/LCC research, and provide guidance on how to overcome specific methodological challenges. They focus particularly on the goal and scope stage of an LCA and Environmental LCC and on side flows from the food supply chain.

To categorise systems in order to be assessed, the concept of “REFRESH situations” (RS) has been developed (De Mena et al., 2016; Unger et al., 2016). The four REFRESH situations (RS) are: Prevention of side flow (RS 1), side flow valorisation (RS 2), valorisation as part of waste management (RS 3), and end-of-life treatment (RS 4). The REFRESH situations can take place at any point/process in the life cycle, within the remit of any stakeholder (including consumers) and are independent of the perspective taken, i.e. of the producer of side stream or the receiver. For each REFRESH situation, specific recommendations on setting of system boundary, functional unit(s) and handling of multi-functionality in relation to the stated problem are provided (beside some other aspects). The importance to differentiate between attributional and consequential approaches is discussed in detail. This consistent approach contributes towards more harmonised use of LCA and LCC for informed decision for handling side flows in the food supply chain.

The focus of the specific recommendations given in this report is primarily on change-oriented studies on interventions for side flows since foot print studies are to a higher degree covered in existing frameworks such as the ILCD-handbook and the PEF framework under development.