Nice Buns! LCA from “Farm to Fork”
by Jenna Watson, Barcelona on 07.24.07
We've told you about the life cycle assessment of bread before. Now we've discovered that the hamburger buns at the Swedish company Cerelia undergo life cycle assessments too! Instead of the classic “cradle to grave” they look at the environmental impacts from “farm to fork”. Energy consumption from the bakery and packaging is one of the major impacts, so they have started to optimize their processes. As well, they report that growing and transport of wheat had significant impacts, with imported wheat causing almost double the impact for energy consumption as opposed to using local Swedish grown grain. Although the graphs are in Danish, you can see that the bakery is the largest contributor to smog, while the farming process is the largest contributor to the category of oxygen depletion. With this information the company is duly working to enhance their processes and reduce these impacts to make their buns and other products greener. Via: LCA-Center Denmark.
Interesting, but lets remember it's the burger that is the wasteful part, not the bun. In fact, making a nicer, higher quality bun might allow us to cut the size of the burger! Let's not have false economy.