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

PARALLEL SESSION 7A: CONSUMERS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
Beef from semi-natural pastures, organic
Beef from semi-natural pastures
Organic beef, KRAV label
Organic beef, EU label
Swedish beef, Svensk Sigill label
Swedish generic beef
Irish generic beef
Polish and German generic beef
South-American generic beef
Figure 1. The beef section of the Swedish meat guide
Carbon footprint
Biodiversity Pesticides
and antibiotics
Animal
welfare
It might seem strange to include legumes, as well as eggs and cheese, in what is called a meat guide. The
reason for including these alternatives was partly to avoid sub-optimisations from exchanging meat for
cheese, a product with considerable environmental impact. Another reason was to show and discuss the possibility
of exchanging some meat consumption for plant-based protein sources, which inherently has considerably
lower impacts and no associated animal welfare issues. Many studies show that in future sustainable
food supply systems, meat consumption in the developed world needs to decrease considerably (see e.g.
Foley et al., 2011), which is why we believed it to be important to also show the environmental impacts of
other protein sources.
Another area of possible criticism concerning the design of the meat guide is the inclusion of pesticide
use and use of antibiotics in the same category. This was done due to the strong desire to keep the number of
indicators to a maximum of four in order to limit the complexity of the guide. Although the use of pesticides
and antibiotics is unrelated, they do have some common features. They are both chemical inputs to production
systems that might leak into the environment and affect ecosystems and species, and the use of both can
be limited by taking precautionary measures (well-designed crop rotations in the case of pesticides and preventive
health programs in the case of antibiotics). In this first version of the guide, use of pesticides and
antibiotics are presented as LCI results rather than LCIA results. In later versions this could be improved by
using LCIA models to capture e.g. variations in toxicity effects between different pesticides.
The design of the criteria for the different indicators and the choice of the indicators involved subjective
judgements. This is unavoidable when condensing a large amount of scientific literature down to consumer
communications. However, many experts and representatives from trade organisations, authorities and
NGOs were involved in development of the criteria and the indicators chosen were as robust and wellconceived
as possible. All underlying assumptions are openly presented in the meat guide, so although there
might be different opinions as to how the criteria should be developed and how different production systems
should be valued, the guide could function as a basis for discussion and raise awareness of the issues related
to livestock production. This was the primary objective with the meat guide as well as making an attempt to
make LCA results on the food product category with the greatest environmental impact (meat) accessible to
the wider public.
5. Conclusions
Basing choice of meat on an environmental impact and animal welfare perspective is complex and cannot be
rely solely on the carbon footprint, as this can lead to goal conflicts. The meat guide described here attempts
to condense and simplify the scientific literature in order to facilitate active choices by the ‘interested consumer’
and food professionals, while still capturing and explaining the complexity in comparing different
production systems. This first attempt to develop a meat guide for the Swedish market has several limitations,
but should provide guidance and can act as a basis for discussion in the important task of decreasing
meat consumption and choosing better meat alternatives.
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