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

PARALLEL SESSION 4C: CROP PRODUCTION SYSTEMS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
suggestions after the evaluations. 4) Compare the environmental burden of different food products on a
common functional unit, e.g. a specific unit of nutrient content. 5) Compare different agro-techniques, e.g.
organic and conventional. 6) Compare different environmental assessment methods, thus compare the results
of the application of methods, such as LCA, ecological footprint analysis or water footprint, on the same
study case. 7) Profile the environmental burden of a production in a given area; in this studies the LCA
evaluation is applied to a statistical database of farms collected in a specific area. 8) Evaluate the environmental
properties of a supply chain, with usually focus on the different in environmental impacts on long and
short distance between production and consumption sites. 9) Assess a preliminary study for statistical investigations;
in this case the LCA results are used with the results of other indicators to elaborate complex indexes.
3. Critical review of LCA studies of fruit
A total of 19 works were identified; 11 articles in ISI journals and 8 papers in proceedings from the LCA
congress series (Table 1).
General aspects of the study cases. With the exception of rare pioneer studies, it can be assumed that
mainstream research on the LCA applied to fruit production systems began in the second part of the first
decade of the century. A number of papers were published in 2010 during the occurrence of the 7 th International
Conference on LCA in the Agri-Food Sector. Despite the high quantity of fruit produced in Asia, most
of the LCA applications published internationally focus on case studies which are located in Europe and
South America. Just one work may be found in China (Liu et al., 2010); it is therefore realistic to assume that
in the coming years, a lot of researches on this subject will focus on the Asian continent both for case studies
and for environmental evaluation of fruit commercialisation.
Objectives. Most of the papers present more than one objective with the exception of the works on the
supply chain (ob. 8), which are usually focused on just this aspect (e.g. Blancke and Burdick, 2008) even if
they deeply investigate the field phase of the production process (e.g. Knudsen et al., 2011). The description
of the environmental burden of the product (ob. 1) is the first result of each investigation, but it is often not
the main object of the paper, which may be instead, for example, the comparison of different methodologies
(e.g. Cerutti et al., 2010). The suggestion of ways to increase sustainability (ob. 3) is often associated to the
evaluation of environmental hot spots (e.g. Cudjoe et al., 2010). The comparison of different assessment
methods is not usually applied to fruit production; it can be only found in the comparison of LCA with Ecological
Footprint Analysis (Cerutti et al., 2010) and LCA with PAS 2050 (McLaren et al., 2010).
System boundaries. The two most used system boundaries are the cradle-to-gate approach and cradle-tomarket
approach. In the first category, the environmental impacts are quantified for the production phase
including all upstream impacts until the farm gate (8 papers). The cradle-to-market category includes studies
in which the distribution and commercialisation phase is included in the assessment (9 papers). Two particular
boundaries are the cradle-to-retailer (2 papers) in which also processing and transport to the distribution
system is accounted, and the cradle-to-use (1 paper) in which also impacts from the consumer phase are accounted.
The nursery, where orchard seedlings are produced, should be considered an upstream process delivering
grafted plants to the orchards and the impact during this stage should be included in assessments of
fruit production systems. Although many authors stress that it is important to consider the nursery in environmental
impact assessments (Milà i Canals and Polo, 2003; Cerutti et al., 2010), the lack of data makes
this difficult. Another important aspect that has to be considered, when the assessment is done on the entire
life cycle of the orchard and not just on a productive year, is the yield in relation to the age of the plantation
(Cerutti et al., 2010). Most of the temperate fruit cultures reach maturity in 2-4 years after installation of the
orchard. Before that age, the yield may be significantly lower (or even zero) because the plants are still too
young. This may significantly affect the average yield, and has to be considered. Furthermore, the yield variability
between years may be very high, e.g. McLaren et al., (2010) reported that the difference between the
lowest and highest yields for green kiwifruit over a period of six year, measured as a percentage of the lowest
value, is 31%.
Product considered and functional unit. Fruits and fruit products may have different quality, nutrient and
economic values, thus it may be difficult to find a significant functional unit. For fruit products, typical functional
units are 1 kg of fruit packed and delivered to the customer or 1 tonne of fruit at the farm gate.
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