Food production has significant environmental impacts, particularly those associated with animal-based products. One often overlooked aspect is the contribution of waste generated during food preparation and handling. The objective of this study was to evaluate and compare the environmental performance of two menus, one animal-based protein and the other on predominantly plant-based protein. The assessment included ingredient production, transportation, food preparation, and waste management. The functional unit was defined as “serving one meal to a student, consisting of a three-course menu”. The dataset corresponding to the inputs and outputs of each system was obtained from the Ecoinvent database (version 3.10), implemented in SimaPro v10.3.0.4. Impact categories were assessed using the ReCiPe Midpoint method. A total of 18 impact categories were evaluated, of which four were analyzed in greater detail. The results show that, for the animal-based menu, ecotoxicity is concentrated in a single dominant process—intensive pig production—whereas, for the plant-based menu, it is distributed across multiple secondary processes, primarily municipal solid waste management and industrial processing. Similar results were observed for global warming. Under the evaluated conditions, the assessment revealed that the plant-based menu had a higher environmental impact than the animal-based menu. Because this study included waste management and packaging, the environmental impact of the plant-based menu increased significantly.
González-Cardoso et al. (Mon,) studied this question.