Sustainable method for food quality assessment: lca study on biogenic amines determination

Background: Quality assessment can inform us about the nutritional values of food, but also about its origin (i.e. cultivation techniques) and organoleptic properties. Analysis of foods is continuously requesting the development of more robust, efficient, sensitive, and cost‐effective analytical methodologies to guarantee the safety, quality and traceability of foods in compliance with legislation and consumers demands. Biogenic amines are a class of molecular marker, used to recognize and to identify food origin, vegetables maturity, cultivation techniques and storage time. Since sustainability is an actual aim of the scientific research, even “green” analytical determinations in food are going to be developed. Green chemistry introduced several points like less waste, low energetic costs, raw materials made by renewable sources. Objectives: The aim of the present work is to compare two different HPLC method for determinate biogenic amines in food matrix. Life Cycle Assessment methodology was applied to evaluate the environmental effects/impacts of the two differents scenario. Moreover, the application of the Life Cycle Cost analysis allowed to evaluate costs in the second scenario. Methods: High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) allow to identify and quantify biogenic amines in food matrices. Two different HPLC methods were compared by Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Cost methodologies. These methodologies permit to quantify the environmental negative output, pointing out opportunities to reduce input and output of the system and to choose the most cost-effective option. The environmental variables were calculated by using Simapro 8 software (ReCIPe 2016 method). Results: The new analysis methodology allows to use just 20.6% of resources. The optimized methodology saves more than 50% with a payback period of 10 analysis. Conclusions: The implementation of new methods of analysis improves the efficiency and sensitivity, pointing out sustainability topic in food quality assessment field.