Quality of Cold Chain Equipment, a Guarantee of Carbon Footprint Reduction from Food Waste to a Sustainable Environment

The objective of this work was to evaluate the current status of commercial cold chain equipment primarily, and secondarily to determine elements associated with the management of cold chain equipment.

To achieve this, a cross-sectional descriptive study began on August 7 to September 23 of 2023, covering 84 commercial establishments including supermarkets, delicatessens and butchers, food, and butchers in the city of Lubumbashi. The data were collected by interview and direct cross-sectional observation on the evaluation of the conservation of frozen products (fish, meat, and cold meats) on the market in the city of Lubumbashi.

The results show us that the structures using cold chains are food stores, butchers, delicatessens, and supermarkets and sometimes in a certain combination. All these structures mainly use freezing and sometimes refrigeration and freezing to guarantee this Cold chain freezers, quick freezers, refrigerated cabinets and refrigerators and finally insulated boxes are all the equipment used for this purpose and using the supply of electric current throughout and often using generators and rarely solar panels in the event of an outage electric current. Thus, these structures operate in an environment rich in temperature fluctuations leading to rapid deterioration of food, waste, responsible for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions GHG, the equivalent of the contribution of the entire African continent to climate change.

This work demonstrated the importance of the quality of cold chain equipment on food quality and its impact on the carbon footprint, a situation observable from the production, transport, storage, and elimination of food. the use of solar energy would be a solution in this process because it produces less greenhouse gases.