Abstracts - ALCAS Conference - Australian Life Cycle Assessment ...

Dr Andréa Franco Pereira
Professor, Department of Architectural and Urban Technology, School of Architecture,
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG
Co Author - Dr Alfredo Jefferson Oliveira, Professor, Department of Arts, Pontifícia Universidade Católica - PUC-
Rio.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of lychee crop in Sul de Minas, Brazil
This study provides results of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the lychee (Litchi chinesis) crop in production
in Sul de Minas, Brazil. Currently, litchi cultivation in Brazil covers an estimated area of 1000-2000 hectares.
The State of São Paulo is the largest producer accounting for about 70% of production, followed by Minas
Gerais and Paraná.
The results presented herein were obtained from the LCA, using GaBi 4.0 software from the inventory which
includes production of lychee and its distribution logistics, with reference to the period of a crop, i.e. one year.
The scope of the analysis includes the step of obtaining the fruit in the orchard (fungicide and herbicide
application, mowing, fertilization and irrigation), as well as the stages of harvesting, packaging, distribution
and consumption. The data input and output were calculated from the functional unit corresponding to a
production of 970 trees in one year.
This analysis is part of research conducted by the producer, whose main objective is to understand the limits
and possibilities of obtaining indicators of social impact in order to allow assessment of the socioenvironmental
consequences, gains and losses of lychee culture during its life cycle. The research intends to
identify critical points in the process during which action can be taken that seeks to mitigate negative impacts,
so that the environmental gains achieved can be disseminated to consumers, and demonstrate the importance
of sustainable market action deployed into production.
Dr Anthony Halog
Lecturer, University of Queensland
Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis of Biofuel Supply Chains
Towards developing an integrated decision support system (DSS) suite of tools that accounts for multistakeholders’
interests in assessing biofuel system’s sustainability, this paper proposes how to address the
grand challenges in evaluating the sustainability of biofuels via life cycle and integrated sustainability modeling
and analysis with consideration to temporal and spatial dimensions.
This work suggests approaches, frameworks, methods and tools that can be used to respond to the challenges
of analyzing the sustainability implications of biomass-based products. Specific grand challenges related to
biofuels have already been addressed in disaggregated and piecemeal fashion in several papers in various
disciplines. However, there is a need to integrate the methodologies systematically and computationally to
obtain comprehensive results (i.e. critical indicators and metrics) that are useful to different stakeholders and
can support decisions and policies in public and private sectors.