As all industrial processes and food production significantly contributes to consumption of resources and presents remarkable environmental impacts to be evaluated through a life cycle approach. This chapter presents and discusses the implementation of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in different food industries. Specific methodological issues related to the food sector are discussed with particular attention to functional unit, system boundary, allocation rules, crop cultivation, manure management and packaging. The following main product categories are considered: products of agriculture, live animals and animal products, fish and other fishing products, beverages. LCA, originally developed to be used as decision support tool for environmental management, has now several related applications such as external communication through environmental labels and declarations. A further step in applying LCA to food industry would be the spread of environmental certification and labeling schemes utilization for Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) communication. For this reason, in this chapter several applications of environmental labels to food products are presented.

Life cycle assessment in the food industry

Ziel der Arbeit ist die Gesamtbilanzierung der Treibhausgasemissionen eines Anbausystems unter Bewasserung auf einem Sandboden. Die dazu aufgestellte Treibhausgasbilanz basiert auf langjahrigen Datenreihen zu Ertragen und Corg-Vorraten eines Dauerfeldversuchs sowie auf zweijahrigen im Feldversuch durchgefuhrten N2O-Messungen. Die durchgefuhrten Untersuchungen zum Einfluss der Bewasserung auf die Corg-Vorrate zeigen, dass der Einsatz von mineralischem Stickstoffdunger und Bewasserung auf einem leichten Standort unter den klimatischen Bedingungen Nord-Ost-Deutschlands positive Effekte hat. Die N2O-Emissionen eines Sandbodens unter den klimatischen Bedingungen Brandenburgs sind sehr niedrig. Die Applikation von mineralischem Stickstoffdunger hat nur schwache und Bewasserung hat aufgrund der der hohen Bodendurchluftung des Sandbodens keine Effekte auf die Hohe der N2O-Emissionen. Die direkten und indirekten Emissionen aus dem Maschinen- und Betriebsmitteleinsatz erhohen sich bei Bewasserung und steigender Stickstoffdungung deutlich. Bei den indirekten Treibhausgasemissionen nehmen die Emissionen der Herstellung des mineralischen Stickstoffdungers einen bedeutenden Anteil der Gesamttreibhausgasemissionen ein. Bewasserung fuhrt durch den erhohten Dieselverbrauch hauptsachlich zu einer Erhohung der direkten Emissionen. Unter Bewasserung kann jedoch ein Teil der Emissionen durch zunehmende Corg-Vorrate kompensiert werden. Somit sind in einigen Fallen die Gesamttreibhausgasemissionen pro Hektar bei Bewasserung geringer als ohne Bewasserung. Die aus Stickstoffdungung und Bewasserung resultierenden Ertragserhohungen fuhren dazu, dass die Gesamttreibhausgasemissionen bezogen auf die Ertragseinheit in den meisten bewasserten Varianten deutlich geringer sind als in den unbewasserten. Daraus lasst sich ableiten, dass Bewasserung auf einem Sandboden zu einer Verminderung der Treibhausgasemissionen beitragen kann.%%%%The aim of this work is the estimation of the net greenhouse gas emissions by a greenhouse balance for an irrigated cropping system on a sandy soil in north-east Germany under various nitrogen fertilizer intensities. The balances are based on data of yields and SOC stocks of an irrigated long term field experiment as well as on results of N2O-measurements over two years. The results of the analysis of the long term response of irrigation and nitrogen fertilization have shown that irrigation and mineral nitrogen fertilization led to significant increases in yields and harvest residues. The increased carbon inputs from above ground harvest residues had positive effects on the SOC stocks. The results of N2O measurements indicated that N2O emissions from a sandy soil are very low. Mineral nitrogen fertilization had only marginal effects. Irrigation showed no effects on the amount of N2O emissions. On the one hand the analysis of the prepared greenhouse gas balances showed that irrigation and increased nitrogen fertilization lead to a strong increase of direct and indirect emissions from machinery and maintenance resource…

Treibhausgasemissionen unter Bewässerung und unterschiedlicher Stickstoffdüngungsintensität auf einem Sandboden in Nord-Ost-Deutschland

Doctor of Philosophy Towards a Spatio-temporal Life Cycle Analysis: a Novel Approach to Consider Local and Regional Inventories by Marina Maier Neglecting dynamic information can impact the results of Life Cycle Assessment studies and wrong conclusions, e.g. in policy making, may be drawn. The long-term vision can be described as the development of a complete Life Cycle Assessment study using one comprehensive spatio-temporal Life Cycle Assessment approach to not only calculate regional and local inventories, but also include a dynamical Life Cycle Impact Assessment to determine environmental impact caused by the regional and spatial inventories. This thesis aims to take steps towards this vision by concentrating on spatio-temporal Life Cycle Inventories. Two spatio-temporal Life Cycle Inventory methods are proposed within this Thesis, both are based on the Enhanced Structural Path Analysis method. The first one includes temporal and spatial information on a local scale and comprises landscape characteristics. Therewith, the dispersion of inventories can be modelled. Results of a case study analysing wheat production show the spatio-temporal dispersion for the example emission of salt in flowing water. The second method uses regional datasets from Ecoinvent to calculate inventories over the entire life cycle. The framework was applied to calculate the CO2-inventories of a 5 MW offshore Wind Turbine over its entire life cycle stages. Results are presented in dynamical emissions maps, showing the accumulation of emissions according to the regional occurrence within the life cycle stages over time. Furthermore, the Enhanced Structural Path Analysis is considered for an optimisation analysis. Limitations of the method are mathematically proven. This includes results that the sum and maximum of the Inventory vector as well as Lifetime of Atmospheric CO2 models can either not be minimised or have restricted optimal solutions. The cumulative output, including and excluding Lifetime of Atmospheric CO2 models are minimal for every inventory vector time-series. The output peaks of the Inventory are minimal if the final demand vector is uniformly distributed. The results are confirmed by simulations for using the 5 MW offshore Wind Turbine case study. The thesis demonstrates that it is possible to implement spatio-temporal information into Life Cycle Assessments. We believe that the proposed methods will improve the traditional Life Cycle Assessments and will help to introduce a framework for a dynamical approach.

Towards a spatio-temporal life cycle analysis : a novel approach to consider local and regional inventories

Introducing a localised spatio-temporal LCI method with wheat production as exploratory case study

Does producing staple food locally cause fewer greenhouse gas emissions than food sourced through imports from another continent? To address this question we used a spatial optimization approach that minimized greenhouse gas emissions from production and transport of five food commodities (barley, maize, oil, sugar and wheat) and compared this to a setting of local production where distances between production and consumption were minimized. We focused on the example of two countries - Brazil and Germany - in order to allow modelling at high spatial resolution. In the model, a minimization of greenhouse gas emissions led to an allocation of large shares of production to locations abroad. In contrast, the local production case, optimized on distance only, resulted in higher greenhouse gas emissions. Our findings show that despite additional transport needs for imports, specialization of countries on the production of specified crops can represent a low climate impact strategy. Model of greenhouse gas emissions of local and spatially optimized staple production.Minimization of emissions led to an allocation of production to locations abroad.Regional production resulted in higher emissions than import-dependent production.

Regional or global? The question of low-emission food sourcing addressed with spatial optimization modelling

MEXALCA (Modular EXtrapolation of Agricultural LCA) extrapolates crop inventory data and impacts from an original country inventory to all producing countries worldwide. This allows estimates of worldwide means weighted by production volumes and of the environmental impact distribution. In this paper, the relationship between the yield and the environmental impacts is analysed in order to test whether the yield alone can be used as an extrapolation criterion. The results show that the global warming potential (GWP) per kg decreases with increasing yields for the means of the 27 studied crops. When comparing the production of a crop in different countries, the relationship between GWP per kg and yield exists only for those crops where the contribution from basic cropping operations and tillage to the GWP is significant. Considering the yield alone therefore generally allows only a poor approximation of the GWP.

Modular Extrapolation Approach for Crop LCA MEXALCA: Global Warming Potential of

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Modular Extrapolation Approach for Crop LCA MEXALCA: Global Warming Potential of