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

KEYNOTE SESSION 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
with accurate and understandable information on relevant product characteristics, including environmental
performance.
In the framework of the Round Table, Working Group 1 (WG1) has been developing a harmonised methodology
called the Protocol for the Environment Assessment of Food and Drink Products (ENVIFOOD Protocol).
The ENVIFOOD Protocol is intended to provide common guidance for assessing the environmental
performance of food and drink products, hence overcoming the difficulties associated with the current proliferation
of standards and guidance documents on this subject.
The main purpose of the ENVIFOOD Protocol is the development of a common framework that will increase
the scientific reliability and consistency in studies intended to support informed choice. In particular,
this will support environmental assessments conducted in the context of business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer
communication, and the identification of environmental improvement options.
This paper provides an overview of the multi-stakeholder approach to develop the ENVIFOOD Protocol,
an overview of the Protocol itself, and possible next steps.
2. ENVIFOOD Protocol: a stepwise process involving a broad spectrum of stakeholders
As a first step towards the ENVIFOOD Protocol, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC)
Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) hosted a scientific workshop in 2010 aimed at arriving at a
common understanding of what is required for: reliable and robust environmental assessment of food and
drink product supply chains; current limitations; and how to move towards more straightforward/focused
criteria/guidance/tools (Peacock et al., 2011).
On this basis, and taking into account the Guiding Principles of the Round Table (Food RT, 2010), WG1
elaborated a Road Map for the development and dissemination of the ENVIFOOD Protocol. Major tasks
planned in the Road Map over the time period 2010-2012 were: a detailed analysis of data gaps and of methodological
issues; drafting of the ENVIFOOD Protocol; public consultation; and revision of the draft Protocol.
In order to validate the ENVIFOOD Protocol and facilitate its application, the following additional steps
were included in the Road Map: testing and fine-tuning of the ENVIFOOD Protocol; and provision of product
specific guidelines, criteria, tools and datasets. Tasks beyond the ENVIFOOD Protocol testing and finetuning
are currently out of the WG1 mandate and thus subject to future discussion and agreement.
As the goal of the ENVIFOOD Protocol was to be built on the existing science for the environmental assessment
of food and drink products, rather than inventing a new methodology from scratch, the detailed
analysis was focused on:
Review of methodologies and guidance documents for the environmental assessment of food and
drink products;
Existing datasets related to food and drink products.
As a first step for the detailed analysis, WG1 focussed on inventorying reference methodologies, guidelines
and assessments. The starting point for this inventory was a survey of existing initiatives dealing with
sustainability issues worldwide. This inventory was then complemented by: a literature search of both scientific
databases (e.g. SCOPUS, Google Scholar and Web of Science) and proceedings of the international
conferences on agri-food LCA; and a WG1 internal consultation. Existing and upcoming life cycle-based
technical standards and guidance documents were then grouped in the following classes:
General methodologies (i.e. reference standards and general guidance documents on LCA; general
life cycle-based standards and technical agreements on footprints and environmental disclosures);
Sectorial methodologies (i.e. sector-specific guidance documents and technical agreements on environmental
assessment and environmental disclosures);
Sub-sectorial methodologies (i.e. sub-sector-specific guidance documents and technical agreements
on environmental assessment and footprinting; and sub-sectorial rules for product environmental
declarations);
Product-specific guidelines (i.e. product category rules (PCR) for environmental declarations for
food and drink products);
Other methodological inputs (i.e. European Union (EU) laws giving guidance on certain life cycle
approaches; relevant life cycle-oriented assessments by international authoritative bodies; any other
methodology and guideline linked to food and drink products).
In order to complement the overview in tabular form of carbon footprint methodologies – study prepared
for the European Commission’s Directorate General (DG) Environment (Ernst&Young and Quantis, 2010) –
a new methodology overview was outlined by WG1 drafting group (De Camillis et al., 2011a) scanning a
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