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Environmental Improvement Potentials of Meat and Dairy Products (EUR 23491)

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This report first presents a systematic overview of the life cycle of meat and dairy products and their environmental impacts, covering the full food chain. It goes on to provide a comprehensive analysis of the improvement options that allow reducing the environmental impacts throughout the life cycle. Finally, the report assesses the different options regarding their feasibility as well as their potential environmental and socioeconomic benefits and costs. The report focuses on improvement options in three main areas: • Household improvements, mainly to reduce food losses (wastage) and to reduce car use for shopping; • Agricultural improvements, mainly to reduce water and air emissions (in particular nitrate, ammonia and methane) and land requirements; • Power savings in farming, food industry, retail, catering, and for household appliances. The study presents the consequences that the adoption of these options might have on a broad range of different environmental issues, including global warming, eutrophication, respiratory health impacts, etc. It shows that when all environmental improvement potentials are taken together, the aggregated environmental impacts (external costs) of meat and dairy products may be reduced by about 20 %. The study has also quantified the economic costs and benefits of implementing the different options.
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... It is the most often used emission metric for climate impact, also in the EN 15804:2012 standard. The Stepwise2006 method is presented in Weidema et al. (2008) and Weidema (2009). The method is relevant because it includes characterisation factors for iLUC where the flow "Carbon dioxide, accelerated" represents the effect of accelerating 1 kg CO 2 one year earlier than otherwise the case. ...
... The earlier the GHG emissions are released, the larger their impact using this method. For the other impact categories, the Stepwise2006 method is not expected to cause a larger contextual difference for Denmark than other impact assessment methods because it was developed in Denmark while building upon the methods Impact 2002+ and EDIP2003 (Weidema et al., 2008;Weidema, 2009). This study differs from similar studies in several ways. ...
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... Studies that assessed the external costs of meat and other food products already exist in the literature, but no study was found that quantified both the environmental and health-related costs. For instance, Weidema et al. (2008) assessed the potential external costs and benefits of reducing the environmental impact of meat and dairy products in the EU, but the health-related costs were not assessed. The authors concluded that the social costs of meat and dairy could be 20 % lower if the environmental impacts were reduced. ...
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... The multiple RE insights from the EN, EC, and SO disciplines have drawn the attention of sustainability sciences (Nørgård and Xue, 2016;Weidema et al., 2008). The SU discipline extends the idea of RE to a broader spectrum of environmental issues (i.e., not just energy use), across the entire life cycle and with a long-term view. ...
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... Third, we concentrate on studies investigating rebound effects in the context of efficiency improvements and sufficiency-related behavioral changes at the household level. Hence, we do not consider studies investigating rebound effects in other contexts, such as time-use rebounds (e.g., Buhl andAcosta, 2016a, 2016b), rebound effects preceded by production side measures (Weidema et al., 2008), rebound effects following changes in household size and degree of urbanization (e.g., Underwood and Fremstad, 2018), or rebound effects prompted by general increases in household income (e.g., Girod, 2008;Girod and de Haan, 2010). Fourth, we exclude studies that apply restrictive re-spending scenarios i.e. that limit household re-spending of financial savings to one or very few consumption categories (Chalkley et al., 2001;Yu et al., 2013). ...
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