Development and application of an ISO based Eco-design approach: the case study of an Italian hospital catering service

The interest of the International Community on environmental issues has increased in the past years and started to affect the market of companies worldwide. The reasons are manifold and related to the fact that products and... [ view full abstract ]

The interest of the International Community on environmental issues has increased in the past years and started to affect the market of companies worldwide. The reasons are manifold and related to the fact that products and processes have an impact on environment along their life cycle. The United Nations, setting the Sustainable Development Goals, stressed the need to adopt a life cycle approach to achieve more sustainable production and consumption and set specific targets to promote sustainable public procurement practices. Along this line, the European Union has lunched the Green Public Procurement (GPP) initiative to support the procurement of greener products and services. Despite GPP is an established procedure in several countries, tools to support companies in developing compliant products and services presents several limits: tools are often too complex, over formalized and not able to answer to companies' needs. The objective of this research was to develop and test a simplified model to support companies in the design of products and services to specifically comply with GPP criteria. To do so, ISO/TR 14062 on Eco-Design along with ISO 14001 and 14040 were combined into a new model made of 4 stages: 1) Life Cycle Analysis to identify supply chain Eco-design criteria; 2) Context Analysis to identify the other Eco-design Criteria; 3) Identification of alternative designs; 4) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to quantify potential environmental impacts of the alternatives and define the final product/service. To test the model, the case study of Serenissima Ristorazione SpA, an Italian hospital catering service Company who was willing to participate in a public call was chosen. Primary data were acquired from the company; secondary data were acquired from Ecoinvent database. The Life Cycle Analysis pointed out the importance of the menu and the choice of raw materials as well as the definition of logistic solutions and the management of energy and chemicals; such area of concerns were also confirmed by the Context Analysis that took into consideration European, National and the specific calls criteria. Based on these outcomes, specific solutions for the reduction of the environmental impacts of the catering service were designed ranging from the definition of a reduced impacts menu, to the choice of methane fueled trucks, to technological solutions for the reduction of energy use during the production of meals and chemical use for cleaning at the hospitals' premises. LCA was applied to quantify the potential reduction of the alternatives and to support the decision on the final design of the service. The impact variation of the proposed services resulted to be -784 tons of CO2 eq per year, - 2306 m3H2O eq per year and - 2176 kg of PM10 eq per year. Results of the study proved the applicability of the proposed model. Future research of the authors will focus on further application of the proposed model in other context in order to verify its generality as long as further integration with Multi Criteria Decision Making Analysis to simplify the valuation of different design alternatives.

Keywords: Eco-design; catering service; green public procurement