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A life cycle assessment of bread production: A cuban case study

Abstract:

The bread production sector is a major food business for Cuban population, which has grown slightly in recent years. In an attempt to pro-vide a better understanding about the food industry sustainability in Cuba, this paper presents an environmental life cycle assessment to estimate the impact of bread production on the environment. This study evaluates from factory gate to output analysis of the processing factory, which includes processing each product and packaging. Two scenarios were compared to assess the effect of bread production on deteriorated technology, the potential benefits of incorporating new technology and clean production practices. The main results show that the Bread Production System-year 2011 (Scenario 1), presents the main impacts on humans and the ecosystem; where the bread production process shows the greatest impacts, with inorganic respiration and acidification / eutrophication being the most relevant categories of this environmental study. In the comparative study, the implementation of new technology in the bread production process allows for greater environmental compatibility, and reduces the overall effects related to the different impact categories by 44%, and damage categories by 47%. Finally, the environmental results were compared with other published studies on bread production in different countries, and various improvementmeasures are proposed to reduce the environmental impacts of the production process.