Sustainability analysis of pet food and animal feed ingredients
Date
2022-05
Authors
Ma, Mingjun
Major Professor
Advisor
Rosentrater, Kurt A.
Mosher, Gretchen
Raman, D.Raj
Yu, Chenxu
Shao, Zengyi
Committee Member
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Abstract
The concept of sustainability has been well discussed and developed since the 1980s. The spirit of sustainability is “development that meets the need for the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The main aspect of sustainability includes economic, environmental, and social development. This dissertation focused on analyzing the environmental impact and economic feasibility of pet food and animal feed ingredients. Life cycle assessment (LCA) and Techno-economic analysis (TEA) are applied to assess the environmental impact and economic feasibility of pet food and animal feed ingredients production.
The first study reviewed and analyzed the first pass life cycle assessment for pet food manufacturing. The first pass life cycle assessment results were generated from the EIO-LCA website. EIO-LCA provides information about the relative impacts throughout the supply chain since the EIO-LCA is a method to estimate environmental impact using economic activity data throughout the entire U.S. economy. Data analysis methods TSNE manifold and DBSCAN were introduced to analyze and visualize the LCA results. The results showed that the pet food supply chain's most outstanding environmental impacts are grain farming, power generation, cattle ranching and farming, and oilseed farming. Power generation consumed the most significant coal energy while grain farming and cattle farming utilized petrol energy.
The second study reviewed the published literature that focused on analyzing the environmental impacts of the animal-based ingredients for pet food. Most of the studies assessed the cradle to farm gate animal production. Mass allocation was introduced to analyze the environmental impact of the animal non-meat parts. The results showed that beef and lamb production has the highest and wide-ranged environmental impact, while chicken, pig, and fish have a relatively low environmental impact. Animal non-meat parts typically result in a substantially lower environmental impact than the use of animal meat. The use of animal non-meat parts could help reduce the environmental impact of pet food production.
The third study focused on analyzing the economic feasibility of a corn wet milling model with three different sensitivity analysis scenarios. The results show that the corn wet milling profit was highly sensitive to corn and starch prices. The 1% corn price or starch price change would result in a 5% wet milling net profit change. The multi-linear regression and backward elimination feature selection method were introduced into the sensitivity analysis. The result also shows that corn price and starch price have the most significant effect on corn wet milling profit.
The fourth study assessed the performance of the corn-soy integrated fermentation as well as the scale-up effect. The results show that replacing water with soy skim and soy fiber would significantly reduce the total fermentation time and increase the ethanol yield. The addition of fiber hydrolyzing enzyme would further increase the ethanol yield of corn-soy integrated fermentation. After comparing with previous lab-scale corn-soy integrated fermentation results, scale-up fermentation has no adverse effect.
This dissertation presented the sustainability analysis for pet food and animal feed ingredients production-related bioprocessing. The results from this dissertation could provide both producer and customer with valuable sustainability information about pet food and animal feed production and help the industry become more and more sustainable.
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dissertation