LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

PARALLEL SESSION 1C: ECODESIGN AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
98
An LCA support tool for management of protected horticultural
systems
Marta Torrellas 1,* , Assumpció Antón 1 , Marc Ruijs 2 , Nieves García Victoria 2 , Juan Ignacio Montero 1
1 IRTA, Ctra. de Cabrils, km 2. 08348 Cabrils, Barcelona, Spain
2 Wageningen UR Greenhouse Horticulture, PO Box 644, 6700 AP Wageningen, The Netherlands
Corresponding author. E-mail: marta.torrellas@irta.cat
ABSTRACT
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful tool for environmental management, but is complex for non-specialists. The objective of this
study was to develop an easy-to-use support tool to help stakeholders in horticulture with their decision making as a way of mitigating
the environmental impact of protected crops. Using a simplified LCA, three spreadsheets were provided and, as a result, two
types of crops (tomato and rose) and two types of structures (plastic multi-tunnel and Venlo glass greenhouse) were evaluated. Results
are expressed by functional unit in six midpoint impact categories. With the analysis of three case studies, results showed that
this environmental calculator is a useful tool to determine major burdens in greenhouse production systems and evaluate the efficient
use of inputs. Simplification of the tool created some difficulties that may be improved with further research, such as the selection of
appropriate data sets and characterisation models.
Keywords: simplified LCA, decision support, environmental impacts, system, greenhouse structure
1. Introduction
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an environmental management tool that can be used for multiple applications,
such as evaluating the environmental impacts of a product or service, comparison of environmental
performance of different products, ecodesign, ecolabelling and environmental product declarations (EPD).
LCA methodology is improving continuously with new characterisation models, databases and guidelines to
increase robustness and areas of use. Thus, LCA can be a complex tool for non-specialists and, as a result, its
application is usually restricted to professionals in the area such as researchers, consultants and other experts.
However, one of the goals of scientific community is to extend research objectives from pure analysis towards
application in decision making and the context of policy. With this aim in mind, an effort was made to
achieve integration between simulation and decision making to provide tools to simplify a complex system.
Over time, societal concern about environmental problems has increased the demand for reliable information
and tools to understand and mitigate environmental damage. Lately, environmental management has
changed through increased requirements and decision making that simultaneously considers economic and
social systems, as well as ecosystems. One of the answers to satisfy this demand has been the appearance in
the market (i.e. websites) of environmental calculators developed as simplified life-cycle management tools
to simulate systems and support decision making. Specific calculators are oriented to a variety of professional
sectors such as ecodesign, the construction industry, energy activities and waste management. In the
food industry, calculators can be found for the environmental evaluation of personal consumption habits
(www. uns.ethz.ch), sustainable shopping (http://jocapqua.urv.es/en/credits.html) and industry activities such
as the Carbonostics calculator (http://www.carbonostics.com/). Greenhouse gas emissions that affect global
warming (carbon footprint) are usually the only factor taken into account, which gives a reduced view of the
environmental problem (Finkbeiner, 2009). Recently, simplified contributions for a wide range of users have
been released, such as the Cool Farm Tool, a greenhouse gas calculator for crop and livestock production at
farm level (Hillier, 2011) and Musa software for water assessment of different agricultural production systems
(Amores Barrero et al., 2012). Horticultural environmental calculators focus on open-field systems, but
the authors are not aware of any such calculators for protected crops. The aim of this study was to develop an
easy-to-use environmental tool to calculate the efficiency of inputs of protected crops and evaluate options to
reduce them. The calculator is based on a simplified LCA, gives results for six environmental impact categories
and is designed to help a mix of users with decision making. This paper presents the environmental tool
that was applied to three production systems. The tool was developed in the context of the EUPHOROS research
project and free access is available on the project website in several languages.
2. Methods
This environmental calculator was based on a simplified LCA following the principle of “as simple as
possible and as complex as necessary” (Pidd, 1996) and the ISO 14040 standard (ISO-14040, 2006). The tool
includes three Excel spreadsheets for three greenhouse production systems representative of current agricultural
practices in Europe (Montero et al., 2011). The following scenarios were used as reference situations: a