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

PARALLEL SESSION 5A: FOOD LABELLING 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
LCA-based hotspot analysis of food products to inform a major
Chilean retailer’s sustainability strategy
Jonas Bengtsson, 1 Cristián Emhart, 2 Alejandro Florenzano, 2* Laura Guccione, 1 Carolina Jaramillo 2
1 Edge Environment Pty Ltd, 501/39 East Esplanade, Manly NSW 2095, Australia
2 Fundación Chile, Av. Parque Antonio Rabat Sur N°6165, Vitacura, Santiago, Chile
* Corresponding author. E-mail: aflorenzano@fundacionchile.cl
ABSTRACT
This paper reports on a project with a major Chilean retailer to: engage their merchants and suppliers to focus efforts on sciencebased
hotspots; provide a starting point for industry engagement to begin implementation of management practices based on life
cycle information; and develop a nationally relevant product category specific measurement and reporting system. Product category
life cycle assessments (PCLCAs) have been carried forward for nine food products – milk, chicken meat, blueberries, apples, grapes,
avocados, wine, beer and pasta – using a commonly defined methodology. This includes normalisation and weighting factors specific
to Chile, resulting in a weighted environmental impact score called the Daily Eco-Impact Indicator.
Keywords: life cycle assessment, PCLCA, food, Chile, retail, hotspot.
1. Background, aim and scope
Food production poses a major global sustainability challenge for the 21 st century. Retailers hold a key
position in the food supply chain to promote and enable sourcing and sale of more sustainable food products.
This should be done by identifying and working towards reducing environmental impacts overall, not merely
transferring impacts across media or stages of the product life cycle, but considering the whole product life
cycle in improvement efforts.
This paper presenting the results of product category life cycle assessments (PCLCAs) produced by Edge
Environment and Fundación Chile for a major Chilean retailer aiming to:
• Engage their merchants and suppliers to focus efforts on science-based hotspots.
• Provide a starting point for industry engagement to begin implementation of management practices
based on life cycle information.
• Develop a product category specific measurement and reporting system.
To this end, PCLCAs have been carried forward to identify overall environmental hotspots of impacts and
improvement opportunities for nine food products: milk, chicken meat, blueberries, apples, grapes, avocados,
wine, beer and pasta. The physical scope of the studies is cradle-to-grave including raw material, production,
distribution and storage, retail, consumer transport, consumption and disposal. The models have been built
based on national and international studies, typical agricultural practices, and modelled using background
information derived from international databases, adapted to Chilean conditions (e.g. electricity mix,
recycling rates, transport distances).
Going forward, the studies and results reported in this paper are intended to be submitted for public
comment, and the internationally sourced life cycle data to be improved with Chilean specific production
data.
2. Methods
The studies were conducted to allow for the transparent and consistent product comparison by use of a
common LCA methodology (ISO 14040 and 14044 compliant) aligned with the ongoing developments of
The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) and the level playing field LCA methodology developed through the
Australian Building Product Life Cycle Inventory project (BPIC, 2010) and AusLCI (2009). The modelling
was performed with the SimaPro software package version 7.3.
2.1. Life cycle inventory data and functional unit
The cradle-to-grave models have been built based on published studies, typical agricultural practices and
background information derived from international databases, adapted to Chilean conditions (e.g. electricity
mix, recycling rates, transport distances).
The functional units used for this paper are based on a typical serving size (USDA) in order to allow the
results to be presented on a similar scale. The functional units, main scenarios and key data sources are
presented in Table 1. The main source of background life cycle inventory (LCI) data used within this study is
a modified version of the Ecoinvent database version 2.2. The modification involves:
437