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

GROUP 4, SESSION B: CROP PRODUCTION SYSTEMS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
105. Improving pesticide accounting in agricultural life cycle
assessment: a review of existing LCA practice and available LCA and
Ecological Risk Assessment models
Mitchell Burns 1,* , Philippe Roux 2 , Carole Sinfort 3 , Claudine Basset-Mens 1 , Eric Malezieux 1
1 CIRAD, Research unit: Hortsys. TA B-103/PS4 Boulevard de la Lironde 34398 Montpellier Cedex 5,
France, 2 IRSTEA, Research unit: ITAP, 361 rue JF Breton, 34196 Montpellier, France, 3 SUPAGRO, Research
unit: ITAP, 2 place Pierre Viala 34060 Montpellier Cedex 2, France, Corresponding author. E-mail:
mitchell.burns@cirad.fr
Pesticides require special attention in agricultural Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) because: i) relative to other
chemical LCAs pesticides are intentionally applied to the biosphere; ii) they are designed to effect a target
group of organisms; and iii) for comparative purposes, they are a characteristic that distinguishes organic and
conventional cropping systems (Hauschild 2000). In a complementary paper, van Zelm et al. (submitted)
characterise an overlap or gap that may exist between LCI (inventory) and LCIA (impact assessment) phases
for the toxicity assessment of pesticide emissions in agroecosystems. Specifically, conceptual models or
available experimental data used to assess pesticide fate should be compatible with the respective LCI and
LCIA phases when considering temporal and spatial scale. This was identified to be an outcome of limited
guidance being available for combining location-specific LCI and globally estimated LCIA outputs. However,
as LCA has been moving toward more locally explicit impact assessments, similar to that of Ecological
Risk Assessment (ERA) (USEPA 1998), accurate characterisation of more complex interactions become
increasingly important and the models used in LCI and LCIA phases should be adapted.
An important conceptual difference between LCA and ERA is that they respectively estimate “potential”
global and “true” local impacts. It is common in LCA that generic emission factors are used to estimate the
extent of chemical distribution between the air, water and soil phases of the environment, with limited accounting
of fate beyond the agricultural parcel gate. In contrast, ERA accounts for more complex fate phenomena
to define the distribution and emission of pesticides beyond the farm gate, as accurate accounts of
these processes are important for risk management. The development of more complex emission models (e.g.
PestLCI; Birkved and Hauschild 2006) has seen LCA move toward this level of complexity. However, an
inventory of pesticide application and fate management techniques (e.g. buffer zones, etc) according to crop
type is needed to improve accurate estimations of chemical distribution and fate for such modelling efforts.
This paper presents a review of how LCAs have typically accounted for pesticide fate and distribution in the
field together with the main available fate models benchmarked against environmental fate (including transport,
transfer and degradation) characterisation approaches typically used in ERA, and proposes some methods
to improve this area of research.
References
Birkved, M., Hauschild, M.Z., 2006. PestLCI - A model for estimating field emissions of pesticides in agricultural
LCA. Ecol. Model. 198, 433-451.
Hauschild, M. Z. 2000. Estimating pesticide emissions for LCA of agricultural products, in Weidema, B.P.,
Meeusen, M.J.G (Eds.), Agricultural data for life cycle assessments, vol. 2. LCANet Food, The Hague,
pp. 64-79.
United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) 1998. Guidelines for Ecological Risk Assessment,
USEPA, Washington.
van Zelm, R., Larrey-Lassalle, P., Roux, P., (submitted). Bridging the gap between LCI and LCIA for toxicological
assessments of pesticides used in crop production: application to banana growing, in: 8th International
Conference on LCA in the Agri-Food Sector, Saint Malo, France, 2-4 October 2012.
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