FoodPrint: Computing Carbon Footprint of Recipes

Abstract

Carbon footprint (CF) is an estimate of the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted by a product, thus assessing the contribution to climate change from the product or service provided [1]. Carbon footprint has acquired center stage in environmental debate as there has been increasing pressure on manufacturers to declare their product's impact on the environment. Calculating the CF of a recipe is a complex task because natural processes are inherently variable. In this study, we calculate the CF of more than 67,000 recipes from RecipeDB [2]. This study aims to facilitate the design of an effective consumer communication strategy through a software developed for computing CF for a diverse set of recipes. It also considers ingredients in a particular recipe that are not available in the dataset upto a certain threshold and grants them an average value of CF.