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

GROUP 6, SESSION B: METHODS, TOOLS, DATABASES 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
151. AusAgLCI – building national lifecycle inventory for Australian
agriculture
Sandra Eady 1,* , Tim Grant 2 , Simon Winter 3
Group 6, Session B: Methods, Tools, Databases
1 CSIRO, Locked Bag 1, Armidale NSW 2350, Australia, 2 Lifecycle Strategies, Swanston Street, Melbourne
VIC 3000, 3 Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia, Corresponding
author. E-mail: sandra.eady@csiro.au
There has been substantial growth in the development of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in agriculture in
Australia and globally over the past five years. A recent survey of activity by University of Queensland
identified more than 20 LCAs of Australian agricultural commodities; many of these sponsored by industry
associations. However, the consistency of these studies is low in terms of their system boundaries, impact
categories, modelling of co-products and data quality. There is a need to develop a national life cycle inventory
(LCI) for agricultural products to support environmental impact studies and to provide data for important
export commodities, so that importers of Australian agricultural commodities can access representative
data to complete LCAs.
The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation has initiated a project to develop an agricultural
LCI database (AusAgLCI) in alignment with the Australian Life Cycle Assessment Database Initiative
(AusLCI). The project began in December 2011 and will run for 20 months. The project will draw on the
extensive research and data collection undertaken in Australia by industry research bodies, state departments
of industry, universities and CSIRO. The first task will be to define important industry sub-sectors to give
appropriate representation of agricultural products that reflect differences in environmental impact and market
segments required by downstream users of the data. Using existing data, the project will align data quality,
breadth of data coverage in terms of the impact categories included (global warming, water and land use,
eutrophication, ecotoxicity) and standardise the documentation of inventories. Resulting unit processes from
cradle-to-farm gate will be reviewed and published. As part of the project, approaches to key methodological
issues are being resolved such as joint production from mixed farming systems, scope of water flows to be
included, carbon fluxes and land use for future impact assessment developments. At the completion of the
project priority areas for additional data collection will be identified.
The project will assess and develop tools to quickly and accurately determine flows to the environment and
inputs from the techno sphere. These will explore the use of spatial data to inform inventory development,
such as spatial layers for nitrogen and phosphors flows from agricultural land use and spatial layers for soil
type for determining fuel consumption for land cultivation.
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