Life Cycle Costing of Food Technologies: A Case Study of a Milling Plant

Life cycle costing (LCC) is a method of assessing the total cost of ownership of a durable item and has been used around the world for the last few decades. This paper investigates the issue of LCC of food technologies, and in particular of a milling plant. The main cost components of this plant are initial acquisition costs, operating costs, maintenance costs and end-of-life costs. An analytic model is developed under Microsoft Excel™ to quantify these cost components. The application of the model is then detailed for one component (i.e., the operating cost) taken as an example, while for the remaining components, we present the main results obtained from the LCC application but omit the detailed computational procedure, for brevity. Overall, outcomes show that the highest economic impact is due to the operating costs, while the remaining costs contributes to the LCC to a limited extent.