In the modern economy, international value chains--production, use, and disposal of goods--have global environmental impacts. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) aims to track these impacts and assess them from a systems perspective, identifying strategies for improvement without burden shifting. We review recent developments in LCA, including existing and emerging applications aimed at supporting environmentally informed decisions in policy-making, product development and procurement, and consumer choices. LCA constitutes a viable screening tool that can pinpoint environmental hotspots in complex value chains, but we also caution that completeness in scope comes at the price of simplifications and uncertainties. Future advances of LCA in enhancing regional detail and accuracy as well as broadening the assessment to economic and social aspects will make it more relevant for producers and consumers alike.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/344/6188/1109.full.pdf

Emerging approaches, challenges and opportunities in life cycle assessment

Supplying adequate human nutrition within ecosystem carrying capacities is a key element in the global environmental sustainability challenge. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been used effectively to evaluate the environmental impacts of food production value chains and to identify opportunities for targeted improvement strategies. Dietary choices and resulting consumption patterns are the drivers of production, however, and a consumption-oriented life cycle perspective is useful in understanding the environmental implications of diet choices. This review identifies 32 studies that use an LCA framework to evaluate the environmental impact of diets or meals. It highlights the state of the art, emerging methodological trends and current challenges and limitations to such diet-level LCA studies. A wide range of bases for analysis and comparison (i.e., functional units) have been employed in LCAs of foods and diet; we conceptually map appropriate functional unit choices to research aims and scope and argue fo...

Toward a life cycle-based, diet-level framework for food environmental impact and nutritional quality assessment: a critical review.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions with urban agriculture: A Life Cycle Assessment perspective

Food production and consumption is known to have significant environmental impacts. In the present work, the life cycle assessment methodology is used for the environmental assessment of an assortment of 34 fruits and vegetables of a large Swiss retailer, with the aim of providing environmental decision-support to the retailer and establishing life cycle inventories (LCI) also applicable to other case studies. The LCI includes, among others, seedling production, farm machinery use, fuels for the heating of greenhouses, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, storage and transport to and within Switzerland. The results show that the largest reduction of environmental impacts can be achieved by consuming seasonal fruits and vegetables, followed by reduction of transport by airplane. Sourcing fruits and vegetables locally is only a good strategy to reduce the carbon footprint if no greenhouse heating with fossil fuels is involved. The impact of water consumption depends on the location of agricultural production. For some crops a trade-off between the carbon footprint and the induced water stress is observed. The results were used by the retailer to support the purchasing decisions and improve the supply chain management.

Life Cycle Inventory and Carbon and Water FoodPrint of Fruits and Vegetables: Application to a Swiss Retailer

This article introduces the special issue “LCA of nutrition and food consumption” and 14 papers selected from the Ninth LCA Food Conference in San Francisco in October 2014. The scientific literature in the field of food LCA has increased more than ten times during the last 15 years. Nutrition has a high contribution to the total environmental impacts of consumption. Agricultural production often dominates the impacts, but its importance depends on the type of product, its production mode, transport, and processing. Local or domestic products reduce transports, but this advantage can be lost if the impacts of the raw material production are substantially increased. Diets containing less meat tend to be more environmentally friendly. Several studies concluded that respecting the dietary recommendations for a healthy diet would reduce the overall environmental impacts in the developed countries, although this is not a universal conclusion. Eight papers analyze the environmental impacts of catering and in-house food consumption and impacts on sectoral and national levels; four papers presents tools and methods to better assess the impacts of nutrition and to implement the results in practical decision-making. Finally, two contributions analyze the impacts of food waste and reduction options. (i) Comprehensive assessment. Most studies only analyze climate impacts, although data, methods, and tools are readily available for a more comprehensive analysis. (ii) Assessment of sustainability. The social dimension remains the weakest pillar. (iii) Data availability is still an obstacle, but significant progress has been made in recent years. (iv) Lack of harmonization of methodologies makes comparisons among studies difficult. (v) Land use. Enhanced consideration of land use impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services is required in LCA. (vi) Defining the functional unit including nutritional aspects, food security, and health needs further work. (vii) Consumer behavior. Its impacts are still little assessed. (viii) Communication of the environmental impact assessment results to stakeholders including policy-makers and consumers needs additional efforts. (i) Development of holistic approaches for the assessment of sustainable food systems, (ii) assessment of land use related impacts and inclusion of ecosystem services, (iii) exploration of LCA results for policy support and decision-making, (iv) investigation of food consumption patterns in developing and emerging countries, and (v) harmonization of databases.

/pdf/environmental-impacts-of-food-consumption-and-nutrition-34wgjdovd0.pdf

Environmental impacts of food consumption and nutrition: where are we and what is next?

Summary There is an increasing need for life cycle data for bio-based products, which becomes particularly evident with the recent drive for greenhouse gas reporting and carbon footprinting studies. Meeting this need is challenging given that many bioproducts have not yet been studied by life cycle assessment (LCA), and those that have are specific and limited to certain geographic regions. In an attempt to bridge data gaps for bio-based products, LCA practitioners can use either proxy data sets (e.g., use existing environmental data for apples to represent pears) or extrapolated data (e.g., derive new data for pears by modifying data for apples considering pear-specific production characteristics). This article explores the challenges and consequences of using these two approaches. Several case studies are used to illustrate the trade-offs between uncertainty and the ease of application, with carbon footprinting as an example. As shown, the use of proxy data sets is the quickest and easiest solution for bridging data gaps but also has the highest uncertainty. In contrast, data extrapolation methods may require extensive expert knowledge and are thus harder to use but give more robust results in bridging data gaps. They can also provide a sound basis for understanding variability in bio-based product data. If resources (time, budget, and expertise) are limited, the use of averaged proxy data may be an acceptable compromise for initial or screening assessments. Overall, the article highlights the need for further research on the development and validation of different approaches to bridging data gaps for bio-based products.

Approaches for Addressing Life Cycle Assessment Data Gaps for Bio‐based Products

Purpose
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used for the environmental assessment of food products, but difficulties arise when evaluating large portfolios of food products or when faced with a diversity of sources of ingredients and/or frequent changes of suppliers. In such situations, a specific, in-depth assessment of each ingredient is not feasible, and screening approaches using a few LCIA (Life Cycle Impact Assessment) results are not recommended. The goal of this paper is to propose an intermediate solution between a screening assessment using limited data and specific LCA for all products considering all sources of ingredients.

MEXALCA: a modular method for the extrapolation of crop LCA

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Approaches for Addressing Life Cycle Assessment Data Gaps for Bio‐based Products

MEXALCA: a modular method for the extrapolation of crop LCA