Who hasn't been standing once in front of the supermarket shelf and asked oneself if the organic carrots from Italy or the cauliflower from the own country is the most ecological choice for the next meal, and then, finally, has decided to buy the delicious asparagus from the USA?

The extent of environmental impacts of food consumption depends on various factors. It is not easy for consumers or even for experts to account for these impacts. ESU-services has conducted several projects aiming to facilitate such judgements.

• Environmental consequences of food consumption: The goal of the Ph.D. thesis by Niels Jungbluth was to assist consumers in considering environmental impacts. Separate LCA's were calculated to assess various aspects of the consumers' choices, e.g., the type of agricultural practice, the origin of the product, the use of packaging material, the type of preservation, and the consumption. The German Öko-Institut has awarded this Ph. D. thesis with the Greenhirn Price 2000.
• The role of packages in the life cycle of food products: The evaluation of packages usually concentrates on a comparison of different packaging materials or types of packaging. In a broader approach, which focuses on the life cycle of packed goods, the full environmental footprint of the system has been investigated together with packaging manufacturers. We investigated food products as e.g. spinach, coffee, chocolate or butter. The environmental relevance of stages and interdependencies was investigated while taking consumers' behaviour and portion sizes into consideration.
• LCA for tap water and mineral water: ESU-services compared the drinking of tap water and mineral water in an LCA. The study has been cited in several dozen of media reports and the SVGW won the award for the best popular presentation of water science in 2006 by the IWA.
• Indicators for monitoring environmental impacts of food consumption: The environmental impacts of food consumption patterns vary from country to country and depend on many different influence factors. ESU-services has prepared an overview of different methods for the OECD Environment Directorate, Project on Sustainable Consumption, that can be used to evaluate these impacts. Here we identified possible indicators for monitoring the impacts of food consumption patterns.
• Embodied greenhouse gas emissions of food trade: We quantified the greenhouse gas emissions due to international trade, the so-called embodied emissions. The analysis complements the national greenhouse gas inventory and provides a realistic picture of Switzerland's contribution to climate change. The same methodology has been used for quantifying environmental impacts of food purchased by the City of Zurich.
• Invited expert for the Californian project "GHGs in the Food System"