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

GROUP 5, SESSION B: FOOD PRODUCTS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
146. Life cycle assessment of an Italian sparkling wine production
Paola Masotti 1,* , Luigia Petti 2 , Serena Melchiori 3
1 Department of Economics, University of Trento, Via Inama 5, 38122 Trento, Italy, 2 DASTA Department,
“G. d’Annunzio” University, 65127 Pescara, Italy, 3 University of Trento, Via Inama 5, 38122 Trento, Italy ,
Corresponding author. E-mail: paola.masotti@unitn.it
The environmental impacts of food products and methods to identify and minimise those impacts are drawing
the attention of producers. Wine producing firms are particularly interested in these topics in order to
demonstrate that along with the quality of the product they are also committed in developing a proper environmental
management of the production chain. To meet the requirements of an important Italian wine producer
the environmental performance of a sparkling wine made by a winery of a Trentino province, has been
investigated.
This paper presents the results of the a life cycle assessment (LCA) applied to an Italian sparkling wine from
vineyard operations, winery activities from grape crushing to bottling, and to packaging.
The main objective of the study was to quantify input flows of raw materials and energy in order to detect
the environmental impacts associated with output flows and releases at any stage, from cradle to gate, of
wine to evaluate the environmental performance. Furthermore, quantification of environmental impacts enables
the identification of the hot spots of the activities and stages and the definition of management practices
to improve environmental performance.
Foreground data were collected from Cantina Rotari (Gruppo Mezzacorona) and refer to production year
2005. Background data were derived from different databases such as EcoInvent and Corinair. The inventory
table was constructed for one bottle of wine (0.75 L) using the LCA software SimaPro and data were
assessed using the Eco-Indicator 99 method.
The characterisation result graph shows that bottle production contributes to all the 11 impact categories
considered with high percentage values for Ecotoxicity (88%) and Acidification (55%). A further step to
better understand the magnitude of the category indicator results is normalisation, which shows (Fig. 1) that
fossil-fuel extraction is the prominent impact category being bottle production and pesticides the major contributors.
As regards the single process contribute to the three damage categories (Human Health, HH; Ecosystem
Quality, EQ; Resources, R) glass production is the first process for both HH and EQ whereas crude oil utilisation
is the first process for R followed by glass production.
Finally, the Ecoindicator single score assessment (Fig. 2) shows the impact of each process to all the damage
categories being the glass production and the crude oil utilisation the ones that more contribute to the damage
categories considered.
This LCA study pointed out that in this specific sparkling wine production there are two processes that
mainly affect the overall environmental impact: the bottle production that accounts for 36% of the total impact
and the pesticides production and utilisation that account for 27.3%.
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