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

PARALLEL SESSION 2C: QUANTIFICATION AND REDUCTION OF UNCERTAINTY 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
206
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
L R
L R
L R
is, [ e ( p ), e ( p )] , [ e ( p ), e ( p )] , and [ e ( p ), e ( p )] are compared to each other, where PC is the
f C f C f E f E
f O f O
conventional production system, PE is the environmentally friendly production system, and PO is the organic
production system.
2.5. System description and impact assessment
An outline of each production system is illustrated in Table 2. The conventional and environmentally
friendly production systems are based on the business activities of an agricultural production cooperation in
2007 and 2008. Details of the agricultural practices in the latter system are defined by the prefectural government.
The organic production system is based on a field trial conducted by the prefectural extension service
staff on the cooperation’s fields in 2007 and 2008. Although there are several kinds of organic rice production
systems in Japan, the organic production system in this study uses rice bran and weeding machinery
as weed control practices.
Table 2. Outline of conventional, environmentally friendly, and organic rice production systems
Conventional a Environmentally Friendly a Organic b
Seed disinfection method Fungicide application Hot-water treatment Hot-water treatment
Density of transplanting (Number
of plates for seedling raising)
28 20 20
Weeding method Herbicide application Herbicide application
Disease and insect damage control
method
Fungicide application
Insecticide application
Application of rice bran
Use of weeding machinery
Type of fertilisers Chemical fertilisers
Chemical fertilisers
Organic fertilisers
Yield (t/ha) 5.96 5.58 4.97
a
Based on activities of an agricultural production cooperation (‘H Farm’).
b
Based on a field trial conducted by the prefectural extension service staff on the cooperation’s fields
Organic fertilisers
The farm gate (cradle to gate) forms the system boundary and 1 kg of brown rice was used as the functional
unit. Global warming potential over 100 years is tentatively applied to the comparisons. This paper
analyses the influence of scenario uncertainty, mainly in fertilisers, on LCA results as a first step to the overall
assessment.
2.6. Life cycle inventory
JALCA (Japan Agricultural Life Cycle Assessment) Database (Hayashi et al., 2012), which is the updated
version of the NARO (National Agriculture and Food Research Organisation) LCI database (Hayashi et al.,
2010), was used to construct the LCI data for the production systems. SimaPro 7.3 was used for data management
and calculation. The details are as follows:
(1) Agricultural input production processes in ecoinvent 2.2 were adapted to Japan using the JLCA-LCA
database.
(2) Six-step transportation processes were constructed to generate transportation scenarios for chemical
fertiliser production, as illustrated in Fig. 1. Three scenarios for chemical fertilisers (the domestic
production scenario, the import scenario, and the national average scenario, which is the weighted
average based on statistics) were constructed.
(3) Emission factors based on Input-Output (IO) tables (Nansai et al., 2002) were introduced to use the
monetary verbal expressions.