How to quantify the impact?

Emissions from cultivation and animal husbandry cannot simply me measured. Therefore these emissions will need to be calculated, based on standards and methodologies for consistency. Various methods exist to assess the impact of products and production systems. One of them is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). An LCA gives the opportunity to capture the whole supply chain of a certain product and the approach reveals all the individual stages of a product or a product system; it describes the whole life cycle of a product. This means all phases in the product's life cycle are analysed, from raw materials, packaging and transport to retail, consumption and waste processing – from cradle-to-grave. An LCA reveals the environmental impacts and where they occur in the supply chain (hotspots). This allows precise actions to be taken to improve processes and products and reduce their environmental impact. This can lead to savings in raw materials and energy use, in turn reducing costs. Furthermore, impacts of different nature can be assessed. For instance, CO2 emissions, land occupation, water consumption and fossil depletion.

Complexity of agricultural LCAs

It is not surprising that worldwide, about 25% of all LCAs are related to the agri-food sector. However, impact assessments of agricultural systems and products can be rather complex. If we for instance zoom in on an LCA of semi-skimmed milk and semi-cured cheese (Broekema & Kramer, 2014) we see that many parameters can influence the outcome of an LCA. Examples are allocation method, impact of land use change and data variation. A different approach concerning these parameters can lead to variation in environmental impact. See results in the table below.

Understanding the complexities, knowing about existing standards and methodologies and good reasoning related to the choices that are to be made when performing an LCA will amount to robust and genuine results. These kinds of results will benefit business, policy or any other goals to be achieved with LCA and on top of that will be beneficial for our earth.

Read more about the LCA of semi-skimmed milk and semi-cured cheese.

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