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

PARALLEL SESSION 4B: DIET 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
Carbon footprint of organic vs. conventional food consumption in
France
Noëllie Oudet * , Perrine Lavelle, Grégoire Thonier, Maxime Pousse, Eric Labouze
BIO Intelligence Service
Corresponding author. E-mail: noellie.oudet@biois.com
ABSTRACT
Our diet has been proven directly concerned by the struggle against environmental damages. Simultaneously, organic agriculture
emerges as a way to mitigate our impact on the environment. Assessing to which extent the rapid development of this rising form of
agriculture can have a positive effect on the environment thus appears relevant. The innovative scientific goal of this project is to
evaluate the environmental impact of “organic vs. conventional consumption”, a wider scale than individual products.
Two steps were followed: characterisation of organic and conventional patterns – considering the global amount of food annually
purchased – and application of the LCA methodology to quantify their environmental burden – only global warming potentials were
established as no satisfying consumption patterns footprints could be calculated for other impacts.
Organic and conventional consumer carbon footprints respectively reach 1 149 against 1 173 kg CO2 eq. Improving the definition of
the organic pattern could strengthen the conclusions,
Keywords: food consumption pattern, organic, conventional, life cycle assessment, carbon footprint
1. Introduction
European food consumption accounts for 20 to 30% of the environmental impacts generated by consumer
products (Tukker, 2006). Our diet is thus directly concerned by the struggle against environmental damages.
Simultaneously, organic agriculture, scheme with strict specification, emerges as a way to mitigate our impact
on the environment, and organic market has been booming for the past 10 years. It appears relevant to
assess the extent to which the rapid development of this rising form of agriculture can have a positive effect
on the environment. Indeed, if the environmental benefit of organic farming methods is fairly accepted when
results relate to the hectare of land use, impact calculation per unit of production lead to more heterogeneous
conclusions. Given foods aim at being eaten, as part of a whole diet, is it relevant to compare environmental
impacts of non-organic product and its organic equivalent to estimate the impacts and benefit of the organic
farming, as the studies carried out so far seem to suggest? Indeed, what happens if an organic consumer’s
behaviour differed slightly from the average French consumer’s one? Thus, the main scientific and innovative
goal of this project is to evaluate the environmental impact of “organic vs. conventional consumption”
on a wider scale than individual products.
This project has been carried out in association with the Synabio, the professional union dedicated to
French organic food processing companies.
2. Method
Our project was conducted following two steps: first the organic and conventional consumption patterns
were defined; second the LCA methodology was applied to quantify their environmental burdens. We focused
on the global warming potential, as it remains the only consensual quantitative environmental indicator
and has thus been assessed for a greater number of products, comparability of the results being easy to ensure.
2.1. Definition of the organic and conventional consumption patterns
Our definition of the organic consumer is based on the annual quantity of purchased organic items. Kantar
Worldpanel, specialist of consumer knowledge based on continuous consumer panels provided us with the
number of households purchasing a given number of products per year. For reasons of sample data robustness,
we had to define our organic households as purchasing more than 50 organic products per year. The
conventional pattern was considered representative of the first two quartile of the population, i.e. purchasing
less than 3 organic products per year. On average, annual purchase of organic products in France reaches 20
products.
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