Life cycle assessment of food waste home composting in Greece

Abstract

Home composting is a waste prevention measure related to the management of the household's food waste, garden trimmings, and other smaller organic household waste streams. Thus, home composting is an alternative way of exploitation of the “biomass” generated from the households. It is an alternative to centralized composting. Biomass utilization is explicitly stated as a principle of green chemistry. The aim of this paper is presentation of the results of a case study dealing with the life cycle environmental assessment of home composting of food waste in households in Greece. The results of the study indicate that home composting is environmentally preferable over the current organic waste management situation in Greece.

Keywords:

• food waste
• home composting
• life cycle assessment
• Greece

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the LIFE10 ENV/GR/622 project “Development and Demonstration of a Waste Prevention Support Tool for Local Authorities – WASP Tool” which was co-funded by the European Union LIFE+ program.