Project Overview

Food waste is one of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time — edible surplus bread is frequently discarded despite retaining significant nutritional and economic value. Rescued Kitchen, a New Zealand eco-enterprise, tackles this problem by upcycling surplus bread into high-quality flour.

As part of the ENVENG 752: Sustainability and Life Cycle Assessment course at The University of Auckland, our team partnered with Rescued Kitchen to conduct a comprehensive LCA of their upcycled flour product. Using OpenLCA, we modelled the full production chain — from bread collection and processing to the finished flour — to quantify its environmental footprint and benchmark it against conventional flour production.

The findings pinpoint the key environmental hotspots of the upcycling process and offer data-driven insights to support Rescued Kitchen's sustainability initiatives. The complete report and LCI data are available for download below.