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

PARALLEL SESSION 1A: WATER FOOTPRINT 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
Table 4. Water Footprint of the 330g organic Strawberry jam
Water Footprint accounting (l/functional unit) Water Footprint (l/functional unit)
Primary Packaging 7.0 1.1
Transport and Secondary packaging 20.8 6.3
Production 9.0 3.0
Farming 200.5 78.0
Total 237.3 88.4
4. Discussion
The water footprint accounting was conducted to determine the quantity of water used to grow organic
and non-organic strawberries in a site in Bulgaria. In this study the organic farming method resulted to be
more water intensive then the non-organic one. This result strongly depends on the different yield of the two
farming method in this specific production site (Table 2). Other studies confirm the importance of this value
when determining the environmental performances of agricultural products (Ercin et al., 2012; Blengini and
Busto, 2009). The values of the blue and green water footprint of the two farming methods resulted to be
very similar. These results depend on the quantity of water used for irrigation and the effective precipitation.
Grey water of non-organic farming is higher because chemicals fertilisers and pesticides (+93.75%) are used.
This value do not consider environmental impacts but it is determined through a water dilution approach
(Jeswani and Azapagic, 2011)
The product water footprint of a 330g strawberry jam was then quantified. Fig.2 represents the contribution
of macro-processes to the overall Water Footprint. The farming processes resulted to be responsible for
the majority of the product water footprint (84.49%) then follows transport and secondary packaging, production
and primary packaging. The value of the transport and secondary packaging depends on the use of
cardboard and wood to pack the final product. Figure 3 represent the contribution of different processes after
characterisation using WSI (Pfister et al., 2009). Changes in contribution depend on the% of blue water of
the different materials/processes considered. Even in this case farming is still responsible for the majority of
the water used. Other processes account for over the 11% of the product overall water footprint.
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Figure 2. Contribution of processes to the product Water Footprint accounting
Figure 3. Contribution of processes to the product Water Footprint after characterisation with WSI