The European Food Sustainable Consumption and Production Round Table Working Group 1 Workshop - Towards the ENVIFOOD Protocol: deriving scientifically-sound rules from exisiting methodological alternatives - Summary Report

Members of the European Food Sustainable Consumption and Production Round Table (Food RT) are committed to helping consumers and other stakeholders to make informed choices by providing them with accurate and understandable information on relevant product characteristics, including environmental performance. In the framework of the Food RT, Working Group 1 (WG1) is currently developing the ENVIFOOD Protocol for assessing the environmental issues of food and drink products due to the proliferation of standards and guidance documents on this subject. The main purpose of the Protocol is the development of a common framework facilitating that environmental assessments are scientifically reliable and consistent in supporting informed choice. In particular, this will support environmental assessments conducted in the context of business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer communication, and the identification of environmental improvement options. WG1 elaborated a Road Map for the development and dissemination of the Protocol. Major tasks in this document by the end of 2011 are: detailed analysis of data and methodological aspects; Protocol drafting; public consultation and revision. The detailed analysis has been recently completed. As the Protocol is expected to be built on the existing science for the environmental assessment of food and drink products, rather than inventing a new methodology from scratch, this analysis has scanned relevant: • General and sector-specific methodologies and guidance documents on the environmental assessment of food and drink; • Datasets related to food and drink products. Moving from the key findings of the detailed analysis to the actual Protocol development, the principal aim of this workshop was to identify specific methodological approaches to be recommended and incorporated in the Protocol. The workshop was structured as follows: • An introductory plenary session to underline the workshop expectations and illustrate the key findings of the detailed analysis on the existing and upcoming methodologies for assessing the environmental performance of food and drink products; • Three break-out sessions to analyse those methodological approaches where consensus is needed; • A closing plenary session for letting break-out session chairs reporting back to the plenary the agreement achieved in each individual break-out session and confirm such approaches. Contributions to the two-days workshop have been summarised in this technical report. Contents are presented in this document by following the same chronological order as in the final agenda of the workshop (see section 2). Comments and suggestions made by participants in each break-out session have been also included in this report.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen