Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Postharvest losses in fruits and vegetables represent a significant challenge across global supply chains, contributing to both food insecurity and unnecessary
environmental burden associated with agricultural production. This study investigated the postharvest effectiveness and environmental performance of a chitosan-based edible coating applied to Hass avocado. The research aimed to evaluate whether edible coatings can reduce postharvest food waste and improve environmental sustainability compared to conventional non-coated scenario. An integrated approach combining postharvest quality assessment and life cycle assessment (LCA) was used to examine both storage performance and environmental trade-offs.

The results showed that coated avocados maintained better visual quality and experienced lower moisture and weight loss during storage compared to non-coated fruit. The effect became more pronounced over time, indicating that the edible treatment effectively reduced moisture loss and helped maintain fruit quality and delayed overripening during extended storage. These findings suggest that edible
preservation systems have potential to reduce food waste and improve resource efficiency within fresh produce supply chains. The environmental assessment revealed important trade-offs between food waste reduction and upstream production burdens. Although the coated avocado system reduced avocado-related global warming impacts from 1.3 to 0.9 kg CO2 eq due to lower postharvest losses and reduced avocado demand per kilogram consumed, the total global warming impact of the coated system (3.5 kg CO2 eq) remained higher than the non-coated system (2.6 kg CO2 eq) under current laboratory-scale roduction conditions. The coated scenario also showed lower land use and waterrelated impacts because less fruit was required to deliver 1 kg of consumable vocado to consumers. However, the environmental benefits of food waste reduction were outweighed by the energy and chemical-intensive chitosan extraction process, which was identified as one of the major hotspots in the coated system.

These findings collectively indicate that chitosan-based edible coating demonstrates meaningful postharvest quality benefits for avocado under extended storage conditions, nevertheless, its environmental justification under current laboratory-scale production is limited, and future research should prioritize industrial-scale LCA and consequential modelling incorporating retail and consumer waste data to provide a comprehensive assessment of the system's environmental viability.