Environmental impacts of the meat chain – Current status and future perspectives

• Research analyzes environmental impact of the meat chain.
• Meat contributes to global warming, acidification and eutrophication potentials.
• Production processes consume resources, generate waste and discharge wastewater.
• Environmental practices differ in companies throughout the meat chain.
• Future research should focus on developing new environmental footprints.

BackgroundThe meat chain sector is recognized as one of the leading polluters in the food industry. Research on environmental performance in the meat industry has been analyzed in terms of the meat product(s), the manufacturing processes and environmental practices in which the meat companies operate.Scope and approachA literature review was performed by analyzing published scientific papers in the domains of environmental impacts in the meat chain. The selection criteria were focused on different environmental approaches applied in the meat chain and on the perspectives of future research.Key findings and conclusionsThis review revealed that the focus of product based approach performed through life-cycle assessments were mainly farms. Scientific papers covered calculations of global warming, acidification and eutrophication potentials. On the contrary, process based approaches investigated on-site environmental impacts of meat production. They were focused on discharge of waste water and solid waste and consumption of water and energy. Finally, environmental systems in the meat chain were the least investigated stream and they analyzed level of practices in respect to the size of the meat companies, their role in the meat chain and certification status. Future research should focus on the development of new dimensions of environmental improvements in the meat chain to enable benchmarking and comparing various meat technologies. Also, analysis of environmental practices throughout the meat chain could be of added value in the exploration of environmental improvement techniques on-site.