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

GROUP 3, SESSION A: LABELLING, CONSUMERS, DIET 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
77. Life cycle assessment of rapeseed and sunflower oils
Laureen Badey 1,* , Natie Lahitte, Francis Flenet 2 , Fabrice Bosque
1 ITERG, French Institute of Fats and Oils, 2 CETIOM, Technical Center for Oilseed Crops and Industrial
Hemp, Corresponding author. E-mail: l.badey@iterg.com
The aim of the study is to provide all necessary information to fit to the French national experimentation of
environmental labeling for two standard oils: sunflower oil and rapeseed oil. The results of this study are a
relevant overview of all sunflower and rapeseed oils produced in France, and are usable as standard values
for both producers and users of vegetable oil. Industrials of oil sector use these values to compare to their
own process values and to evaluate the improvement due to their ecodesign strategy. For example, the use of
a biomass boiler, the reduction of packaging, different choices for the suppliers of the seeds lead to a lower
LCA score.
The complete life cycle of oils has been studied from the seeds production to the end of life of the packaging.
Only storage and use have been excluded from the study because of a lack of data. The life cycle inventory is
illustrated in Fig. 1. In this graph, the cells in dotted line are the steps excluded from the study. All the other
ones are included. An energetic allocation has been done to the co-products (with a grey frame in the graph).
The data were collected from different industrial sites belonged to Sofiproteol group that illustrate the diversity
of all the French crushing, refining and packaging sites. About 4.5 million seeds were crushed in 2010
by Sofiproteol group, which represents 80% of French crushing. A focus has been made on the impacts of
crushing and chemical refining. The industrial data are specific to edible oils. Note that refining of edible oil
(chemical refining) differs from the refining of oil used for biofuels (physical refining).
For the agricultural step, data has been gathered from ADEME (2010) on first generation of biofuels used in
France and has been rounded off by CETIOM expertise (water consumption). Life cycle inventories (LCI)
come from the LCA database ecoinvent.
The indicators used are congruent with the French national experimentation of environmental labelling:
greenhouse gases (GHGs) and water consumption. The most important point in the results (Table 1) is that
the agricultural step is responsible of most impacts on the studied indicators (from 58-71% of GHG and 47-
73% of water consumption). The other steps that contribute the more are the industrial step, the transport and
the packaging.
References
ADEME - Direction Production et Énergies Durables, 2010. Analyses de cycle de vie appliquées aux biocarburants
de première génération consommés en France. Final report. 236 pages.
ADEME, AFNOR, 2011. BPX 30-323 - Principes généraux pour l'affichage environnemental des produits de
grande consommation - Partie 0: principes généraux et cadre méthodologique.
Shonfield, P.K.A., Dumelin E.E., 2005. A life cycle assessment of spreads and margarines. Lipid Technology,
17: 199-203.
Schmidt, J, 2007. Life cycle assessment of rapeseed oil and palm oil, Ph.D. thesis.
Wightman. P., Eavis, R., Batchelor, S., Walker, K., Bennett, R., Carruthers, P., Tranter, R., 1999. Comparison
of rapeseed and mineral oils using life-cycle assessment and cost-benefit Analysis. OCL – Oleagineux,
Corps Gras, Lipides, 6: 384-388.
Table 1. Results of LCA on rapeseed and sunflower oils
Rapeseed oil Sunflower oil
Refining Packaged Refining Packaged
Indicator Unit oil oil oil oil
GHG emissions
g CO2
eq
127 154 89 112
Water consumption
litres 0.7 1.0 1.7 1.9
769