Resource Saving and Environmental Benefits From Cooking With Natural Fiber Handcrafted Boxes

Cooking food is an essential human activity that implies energy consumption. Solutions for reducing those consumptions and the associated environmental impacts exist, which mainly focus on incentivizing the use of highly performant cooking appliances. This study applies the ISO-standardized Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method to an Italian production brand of natural fiber handcrafted cooking boxes utilized for simmering food without consuming energy. To disclose the environmental benefits of such cooking practice, an ex-ante analysis of potentially avoided impacts was performed comparing the use of the cooking box with several scenarios of cooking “without” the box. Results show that, if the cooking box were used regularly around twice every day for 10 years by a household, it could potentially generate impacts on particulate matter formation (~331 g PM2.5-eq.), on global warming (~326 kg CO2-eq.), and on water consumption (~9.6 m3), among others. At the same time, however, simmering food with the cooking box might help avoid relevant environmental loads. Scenario analysis demonstrates that, if conventional cooking technologies such as radiant, induction or gas hobs were used instead of the cooking box, the potential impact could dramatically be higher, for values in between ~66% to ~86% depending on the food cooked and the impact category indicator assessed. By outlining the environmental performance of the cooking box, the benefits in terms of saving resources and reducing the impact associated with human food production are revealed. Although rooted in ancient culinary traditions, the cooking box represents a highly innovative technology within contemporary Western culinary practices.