Towards Healthy and Sustainable Diets: Understanding Food Consumption Trends in the EU.

The assessment of food system sustainability requires a profound understanding of the evolution of food production and consumption. Monitoring the transition towards healthier and sustainable diets is crucial for supporting future interventions. This study explores market sales data as an input to investigate and compare current dietary trends in the European Union Member States over 14 years.

Life cycle thinking for the assessment of waste and circular economy policy: status and perspectives from the EU example.

Life cycle thinking methods such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and costing (LCC) were originally developed to assess the performance of products and services (business-making decisions). However, they are increasingly deployed to support policy-making along the entire policy cycle, including via impact assessment (IA) of different policy options. These applications are associated with a number of challenges, mainly related to the dynamic and prospective nature of policy IA, typically forward-looking into 10-20 years ahead.

Biodiversity Impact Assessment Considering Land Use Intensities and Fragmentation.

Land use is a major threat to terrestrial biodiversity. Life cycle assessment is a tool that can assess such threats and thereby support environmental decision-making. Within the Global Guidance for Life Cycle Impact Assessment (GLAM) project, the Life Cycle Initiative hosted by UN Environment aims to create a life cycle impact assessment method across multiple impact categories, including land use impacts on ecosystem quality represented by regional and global species richness.

Grown and thrown: Exploring approaches to estimate food waste in EU countries.

National studies on food waste quantification in EU countries present highly discrepant results due to the different quantification approaches adopted. The European Commission has published a delegated act establishing a common methodology and minimum quality requirements for the uniform measurement of food waste generated in Member States. Nevertheless, as EU countries are at different levels of development and implementation of national strategies for food waste quantification, there is a need to develop a harmonized modelling system that enables the estimation of food waste generated by Member States to assess the amounts reported by each country.

No time to waste: assessing the performance of food waste prevention actions.

As a result of the growing awareness of the need to prevent food waste, several initiatives have been launched in the last few years to reduce food waste generated across the food supply chain. However, the evaluation of food waste prevention interventions is still at an early stage of development and appropriate methods to assess their effectiveness are missing, hampering the identification of best practices amongst existing initiatives and the prioritisation of those that are most promising. To address such needs and provide a common approach to consistently assess the performance of food waste prevention initiatives, the European Commission Joint Research Centre has developed an evaluation framework for food waste prevention actions.

Sustainability of food waste biorefinery: A review on valorisation pathways, techno-economic constraints, and environmental assessment.

The need to increase circularity of industrial systems to address limited resources availability and climate change has triggered the development of the food waste biorefinery concept. However, for the development of future sustainable industrial processes focused on the valorisation of food waste, critical aspects such as (i) the technical feasibility of the processes at industrial scale, (ii) the analysis of their techno-economic potential, including available quantities of waste, and (iii) a life cycle-based environmental assessment of benefits and burdens need to be considered. The goal of this review is to provide an overview of food waste valorisation pathways and to analyse to which extent these aspects have been considered in the literature.

Quantification of food waste per product group along the food supply chain in the European Union: a mass flow analysis.

In 2015, the United Nations defined the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which include a target (12.3) on food waste. The target requires "by 2030, to halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and to reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses".

Soil quality index: Exploring options for a comprehensive assessment of land use impacts in LCA.

Impacts associated with land use are increasingly recognized as important aspects to consider when conducting Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Across the existing models accounting for land use activities in life cycle impact assessment, a balance is yet to be found between complexity and comprehensiveness on one hand, and applicability on the other hand. This work builds on the LANd use indicator value CAlculation (LANCA) model, assessing the impacts of land use activities on five soil properties, and aims at developing an aggregated index to improve its applicability.

Quantifying household waste of fresh fruit and vegetables in the EU.

According to national studies conducted in EU countries, fresh fruit and vegetables contribute to almost 50% of the food waste generated by households. This study presents an estimation of this waste flow, differentiating between unavoidable and avoidable waste. The calculation of these two flows serves different purposes.

Dataset of the livability performance of the city of Birmingham, UK, as measured by its citizen wellbeing, resource security, resource efficiency and carbon emissions.

This data article presents the UK City LIFE data set for the city of Birmingham, UK. UK City LIFE is a new, comprehensive and holistic method for measuring the livable sustainability performance of UK cities. The Birmingham data set comprises 346 indicators structured simultaneously (1) within a four-tier, outcome-based framework in order to aid in their interpretation (e.