With one-third of food being wasted at the various steps of the value chain, there is a large amount of biomass constantly being discarded, also wasting the resources consumed for its production. Several strategies have been proposed to use this biomass as a source of raw materials for the production of plastic alternatives, but the environmental impact parameters have rarely been estimated to understand if the proposed process provides an overall benefit. The purpose of this paper is to analyze, through an experimental laboratory campaign, the production process of a vegetable biocomposite material obtained by valorization of biomass from two sources: unsold vegetables from a wholesale market and carrot pomace obtained as a byproduct of juicing. The obtained biocomposite films were thermoformed into trays to replace the traditional plastic food containers made principally with PET. Different scenarios for the lab-scale production of trays were evaluated by testing two water-based processing methods for the two types of biomass used. In order to understand which of the four scenarios was the least impactful, the global warming potential, the cumulative energy demand, and the water scarcity index were used as indicators. Among the different lab-scale processing scenarios for the upscaling of vegetable waste, the least impactful was starting from the unsold/discarded vegetables collected at the wholesale market that were processed via water-based hydrolysis catalyzed by formic acid. Impact parameters were comparable or better than two traditional polymers (PET and HDPE) and two biopolymers (PLA and biopolymer from starch), showing that this process has excellent potential, from an environmental point of view, of substituting plastic packaging.

中文翻译：

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通过蔬菜废物的水基升级循环生产托盘的循环经济过程的生命周期评估

三分之一的食物在价值链的各个环节被浪费，大量生物质不断被丢弃，也浪费了其生产所消耗的资源。已经提出了几种策略来使用这种生物质作为生产塑料替代品的原材料来源，但很少估计环境影响参数来了解所提议的工艺是否提供了整体效益。本文的目的是通过一个实验性的实验室活动来分析一种植物生物复合材料的生产过程，该材料是通过对两种来源的生物质进行增值获得的：批发市场上未售出的蔬菜和作为榨汁副产品获得的胡萝卜渣。将获得的生物复合膜热成型为托盘，以取代主要由 PET 制成的传统塑料食品容器。通过测试两种使用的两种生物质的水基处理方法，评估了实验室规模生产托盘的不同方案。为了了解四种情景中的哪一种影响最小，我们使用了全球变暖潜能值、累积能源需求和缺水指数作为指标。在用于扩大蔬菜废物规模的不同实验室规模处理方案中，影响最小的是从批发市场收集的未售出/丢弃的蔬菜开始，这些蔬菜通过甲酸催化的水基水解进行加工。