Bringing food products to the majority of U. S. consumers generally involves frequent and lengthy trips from the food growers and producers through a distribution network to the institutional, grocery, and restaurant businesses. Increasingly, businesses are assessing the impact of their purchasing decisions on their carbon footprints. These decisions have complex implications for the environment based on the mode of transportation employed, the corresponding packaging used to transport the goods, and the resulting waste and disposal transportation. For example, a restaurant may choose to support local farmers and their region’s seasonal products versus purchasing from large national food suppliers with products sourced from multiple producers around the globe. The local farmer may use a pick-up truck to service multiple customers with minimal packaging and recyclable totes; the distributor tends to use long and short haul trucking with protective packaging, generating more waste... View Full Summary

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Bringing food products to the majority of U. S. consumers generally involves frequent and lengthy trips from the food growers and producers through a distribution network to the institutional, grocery, and restaurant businesses. Increasingly, businesses are assessing the impact of their purchasing decisions on their carbon footprints. These decisions have complex implications for the environment based on the mode of transportation employed, the corresponding packaging used to transport the goods, and the resulting waste and disposal transportation. For example, a restaurant may choose to support local farmers and their region’s seasonal products versus purchasing from large national food suppliers with products sourced from multiple producers around the globe. The local farmer may use a pick-up truck to service multiple customers with minimal packaging and recyclable totes; the distributor tends to use long and short haul trucking with protective packaging, generating more waste and subsequent transportation for hauling of refuse. The objective of the proposed research is to examine the environmental implications of the purchasing decisions made by these intermediary food businesses. The proposed project has two parts: 1) conducting an assessment of the current “food miles” of business supply chains including modes of transport and distance traveled, developing a strategy to measure progress toward reducing the total food miles traveled, and evaluating the overall impact of the transportation process; and 2) assessing the waste associated with the supply chains from a life cycle perspective, with a specific focus on the relationship between transportation mode and packaging. For this project, the transportation destination of the food products is represented by institutional, grocery, and restaurant businesses in Portland metropolitan area. We will start by assessing the current condition; then conduct life cycle assessments of different types of materials and identify alternatives that meet packaging requirements (e.g. shelf stability etc) with reduced environmental impacts. Ultimately this project will serve as the foundation for a broader assessment of an organization’s carbon footprint which would extend to other forms of energy usage, transportation, and materials management. This represents an enhancement of current ‘food miles’ assessment methodologies, which primary consider greenhouse gases emitted during food transport. We will use surveys, depth-interviews and simulation modeling for this project. Current purchasing practices, corresponding transportation modes, packaging, subsequent waste, and hauling of representative samples of institutional, grocery, and restaurant businesses will be assessed. Existing food purchasing/carbon foot print initiatives (e.g., Bon Appetit Catering, Truitt Brothers) will inform our approach. The research results can be used to develop purchasing and logistics strategies and models for supplier collaboration to reduce carbon foot print as well as overall transportation and waste costs. Additionally, we hope to contribute to the knowledge on new packaging development and supplier load consolidation models to reduce energy requirements, emissions and waste. We expect to present papers at various business, food, and logistics conferences on our project and results.

Portland State University Office of Sustainability, Center for Design Innovation & Sustainability,

Project Type: Research
Start Date: October 1, 2007
End Date: March 19, 2009
Related Projects: None
Research Area: Healthy Communities
RiP Number: 14679