The food processing industry is a vast, and vitally important, sector of the national economy. Its environmental impact is commensurate with its size. For example, the food sector ranks in the top ten emitters of two key priority air quality pollutants (nitrogen oxides and fine particulates), and fourteenth in volatile organic compounds, when sectors are compared by two digit SIC code. This puts the food processing sector in same league as the heavy manufacturing industries in terms of overall environmental importance.
The major trade organizations for the sector include some that represent broad sector interests as a whole, such as the National Food Processors Association (NFPA) and the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA), as well as others representing major food categories, such as the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the American Meat Institute (AMI), and still others representing various process-related categories, such as the National Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Association (NFFA) and the Organic Trade Association (OTA). Typically, trade organizations will offer guidance on environmental and health issues to their members, and the food processing industry is no exception. However, the focus is somewhat different from that of the traditional smokestack industries.
Food processors are concerned primarily with any health and safety issues affecting the quality of their products, and secondarily with environmental issues associated with the downstream fate of the products (environmental labeling, recycling and bottle deposit systems, solid waste management issues arising from packaging, etc.). There appears to be much less emphasis on the environmental impacts on the part of food processing facilities resulting from the industry's various manufacturing processes, and virtually no mention of an EMS approach to managing those processes.
There are a few scattered programs, but there does not seem to be any good publicly accessible gateway to information about them. The AMI, working with the EPA Sector Strategies Program, has investigated the potential for EMS programs in meat processing plants, and the NCMS Environmental Roadmapping Initiative (ERI) has created several Best Manufacturing Practices guides for Red Meat and Poultry Slaughter Plants, Further Processing (cutting and canning of meat), and Rendering.
One example of an EMS template that has been prepared for the meat processing industry is briefly described on a page that provides a link to the template itself (although the link appeared not to be functioning as of 6/20/03). The template was prepared as part of a pilot program involving EPA and the Iowa Waste Reduction Center.
Other isolated examples of EMS initiatives in the food sector may well exist, but efforts to locate them through web searching and contacts with persons familiar with various segments of the sector have not yet proved successful. An EMS-based program focused on this sector would face a number of challenges, but the risk of duplication of effort does not seem to be among them.
Table of available resources for this sector. Unfortunately, the table lists very few actual resources. Links are provided to locations where one would expect to find such resources if they existed, and may help give some sense of how environmental issues tend to be approached in this sector.