MIPS as a tool for analysing food chains sustainability.

Nutrition is one of the most demanding area of need in terms of natural resource consumption. The following paper introduces a material-flow based methodology, MIPS (Material Input per Service Unit), for sustainability assessment of food. Two different investigations, concerning supply and demand side of nutrition, compose the study. In the first part we analysed the value chain of three Italian foodstuffs (pasta, rice, orange juice) and calculated the material intensity along the life cycle. These results were used in the second part, joined with data from the literature, for quantifying the natural resource consumption of 25 European diets. We argue that MIPS is a feasible assessment tool for enhancing sustainability in agro-food systems and revealing the contribution of each life cycle phase in the total impact. Our findings show farming phase being crucial in rice and natural orange juice production. It contributes for around 80% of the total material requirements of these crops. Instead, in pasta and concentrated orange juice industrial processing has a bigger weight. The comparison between organic and conventional rice shows that exists a trade-off in the use of biotic (renewable) and abiotic (no renewable) resources. Concerning the diets analysis, for each country we quantified the natural resources consumption due to nutrition and the average material intensity of a unit of generic food. These values are compared with the composition of diets in the different countries. Consistently with other studies, MIPS proved the stronger impact for diets with higher intakes of meat and animal products.