Environmental Impact Assessment during Dried Cabbage Production Process based on LCA –Possibility of Environmental Burden Reduction by Blanching Treatment–

Abstract

Pretreating fruit and vegetables by blanching, which is the heat treatment for inactivation of enzyme which deteriorates the quality of fruit and vegetables, prior to the drying process can increase the drying rate, which will reduce the environmental burden from the drying process during food processing. In this study, the pretreatment and drying rate were evaluated to potentially reduce the environmental burden during the dried cabbage production process. We discussed the relationship between qualities of the dried product and environmental burden using environmental efficiency as the indicator of environmental burden, which was obtained from nutritional data for the dried product. The pretreatment by hot water blanching reduced energy consumption during the drying process by approximately 50%. The result of integration analysis based on LIME2 showed that 63.4% of the environmental burden was reduced by introducing hot water blanching before drying. Although the L-ascorbic acid content and soluble solids content decreased from blanching, environmental efficiency for the blanched sample was higher than that for the un-blanched sample. These results indicated that blanching pretreatment was an environmentally-friendly pretreatment for the dried cabbage production process.