Transcript Life Cycle Assessment for the sustainability measurement

Life Cycle Assessment for the sustainability
measurement of the winemaking chain
Graziella Benedetto - University of Sassari
Claudio Pattara - University of Pescara
Paris, 16 april 2015 – ANAECO Group
Overview
-Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) within international
scientific literature;
-How LCA works?;
- Carbon Footprint (CF) and LCA comparison;
- LCA's hot-spots in wine sector;
- Future research topics;
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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) within
international scientific literature
- This analysis technique is well-established and its potential have been released
to calculate environmental emissions associated with a product or process also
extremely articulate that ranges from the field:
- building (Lavagna, 2011);
- waste management at local level (Buttol et al, 2007; Cherubini et al, 2007;
De Feo, Malvano, 2008; Rigamonti et al, 2009; Scipioni & Niero, 2011);
- tourism systems (De Camillis et al., 2010)
- food and beverages (e.g. Rugani et al., 2013; Notarnicola
et al., 2015) including the wine sector, which is also the area
where the different approaches of LCA have been most
tested;
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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) within International
Certification
- Certification of environmental management
process (ISO 14001 series): concerns the
environmental management of the organizations,
and allows to obtain a certificate of compliance with
the requirements contained in the environmental
management standard, obtained by third party
accredited to the ISO; is a voluntary certification
(ec.europa.eu);
- Ethic certification SA8000 o Social
Accountability (www.sa-intl.org): is an international
standard, issued by accredited impartial external
body, which recognizes the company responsible
behavior regarding social ethics and the respect of
strictly certain criteria relating to the business
management system, related to corporate social
responsibility (SA8000);
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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) within International certification
-
OHSAS (Occupational Health and Safety
Assessment Series) 18001-ISO (45001 – 2016),
identifies an international standard for management
systems Safety and Occupational Health. The rule was
enacted in 1999 by the BSI (British Standards
Institution) and revised in 2007 and attests to the
voluntary application of a system that provides control
over the safety of workers (www.ohsas.org);
- EPD, is a tool that increases the environmental
communication between producers (business to
business) and between distributors and consumers
(business to consumers) based on the use of LCA; It
was developed in Sweden, has international
importance and is structured implementation and
enforcement of the UNI ISO 14025: 2006; provides
objective, comparable and credible regarding the
environmental performance of products and services
and allows for comparison between products of the
same class (EPD);
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How LCA works?
LCA is a “cradle-to-grave” approach for assessing industrial systems. “Cradle-to-grave”
begins with the gathering of raw materials from the earth, to create the product, and ends at
the point when all materials are returned to the earth.
The term “life cycle” refers to the major activities in the course of the product’s life-span
from its manufacture, use, and maintenance, to its final disposal, including the raw material
acquisition required to manufacture the product.
Life Cycle stages – EPA, 1993
OUTPUTS
INPUTS
Raw materials acquisition
Raw material
Manufacturing
Atmospheric
emissions
Waterborne
wastes
Solid wastes
Energy
Use/Reuse/Maintenance
Recycle/Waste management
System boundaries
Co-products
Other releases
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How LCA works?
LCA (ISO 14040 and 14044) is “ the compiling and evaluation of the
inputs and outputs and the potential environmental impacts of a product
system during a product's lifetime” (p. 8)
According to the ISO standards it consist of four steps:
1. Goal Definition and Scoping - Define and
describe the product, process or activity. Establish
the context in which the assessment is to be made
and identify the boundaries and environmental
effects to be reviewed for the assessment.
2. Inventory Analysis - Identify and quantify
energy, water and materials usage and
environmental releases (e.g., air emissions, solid
waste disposal, waste water discharges).
3. Impact Assessment - Assess the potential
human and ecological effects of energy, water, and
material usage and the environmental releases
identified in the inventory analysis.
4. Interpretation - Evaluate the results of the
inventory analysis and impact assessment to select
the preferred product, process or service with a
clear understanding of the uncertainty and the
assumptions used to generate the results.
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High quality and environmental profile for
a wine
Quality of wine
The production trend in Italy is
moving towards high quality wines
Environmental profile
41 DOCG (controlled and guaranteed
denomination of origin)
36 DOC (controlled denomination of
origin)
120 IGT (typical
indication) wines.
Environmental burden of a product
–
Life Cycle Assessment
geographical
Environmental
comunication
EPD
Carbon
footprint
The application of LCA on
agri-food products - wine
The application of LCA to wine industry presents various
problems common to all agri-food products.
It is necessary to analyse the chain in:
an agricultural phase
- an industrial phase
The difficulties are due to the complexity of this activity
where technology is just as important grape quality or
skills Winemakers.
LCA - CFP
The wine industry has been increasingly impelled by market and regulatory drivers to
assess and reduce carbon emissions;
As expected, despite a few differences in framework and modelling, results concerning global warming are
rather consistent
CFP
-Lack of accurate baseline data was confirmed
and the need of further improvement and
adaptation to additional contexts was
LCA
-Multi-indicator methodology, covering « a
diversity of environmental impacts and
may include comparison across impact
categories» (Finnveden et al, 2009, p. 2)
-The calculator carries out an accurate
- LCA seems to be more effective in
avoiding environmental burdens and
impacts to be shifted from:
assessment of emissions as it contains effective
- one life-cycle step to another;
tools capable of providing concise information
- or from one environmental concern to
another;
highlighted;
analysing all phases of wine production;
-CF seems to be more suitable as a marketing
tool;
LCA??? <=>CFP???
• LCA:
– B2B;
– improving the sustainability (environmental economic and
social) of the sector;
• CFP:
– B2C; a “catchy” concept «promoted and diffused outside
the research community», useful «to promote a more
consistent framework for environmental assessment of
products and services» (Weidema et al, 2008, p. 6);
– fight the most immediate challenges (global warming);
Goal and scope in wine sector
-LCA applied to the wine sector is primarily aimed at
attributing part of the total environmental burden of the
economy to the wine production processes, to allow company
to identify 'HOT SPOTS' or critical phases of the LC of wine
and for communication purposes (Aranda et al, 2006;
Benedetto, 2010; Vázquez-Rowe et al, 2013);
-LCA is of particular relevance when the aim of the wine firm is to reduce the CF of their
product using specific environmental strategies such as eco-labeling (Ardente et al, 2006;
CIV, 2008; Barry, 2011; Gonzalez et al, 2006), mitigation of GHG emissions (Bosco et al,
2011);
-Despite the strong proliferation of wine CF studies in recent years, some extensive review
(Rugani et al, 2013) demonstrates the wide range of applications that remain unexplored in
this field. To date, most studies have focused on analyzing specific methodological issues
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froman A-LCA perspective, or to directly reporting the CF profile of a given wine product.
LCA's hot-spots for wine production chain (Notarnicola et al, 2014)
1. cultivation stage, mainly because of pesticides and fertilizers;
– mostly on Ecotoxicity (ECT) and Human Toxicity (HT) – strictly
dependent on the use of pesticides, affecting water and soil toxicity and the
human toxicity of workers in the field;
– contribution on Eutrophication (NP) and Acidification (AP) – essentially
depends on the use of nitrogen and phosphate fertilisers; while NP is
caused by water releases of phosphated and nitrates and to air emissions of
Nox and NH3, AP is due to emissions of Nox occurring during the
fertilisers use;
2. Packaging, mainly because of the production of glass used for bottling; it
especially affects energy consumpion, GWP, HT and AP;
3. Electric energy consumption in the winery; the stage with the highest energy
consumpion is the bottling, which accounts for about 60% of the total energy
consumption, followed by the refrigeration phase;
4. Distribution, because of fuel consumption in transportation processes: this
stage is relevant when the winery and the retailer are at some distance from
each other. Because the export of wine is increasingly by sea, the consumption
of fossil fuels and the transportation means are elements that usually play a
significant role in the generation of impacts such as GWP (Notarnicola et al
2014, pag. 169);
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Future research topics
- Future studies will have to deal with increasingly complex interactions linked to the entire life
cycle of wine-making.
-Current methodological hot topics in life cycle thinking suggest that an integrated sustainability
assessment (i.e. LCSA), which includes the evaluation of economic and social issues, will also
develop in the wine sector, where by it may become easier beginning with a CF analysis and then
broadening the scope to the other two pillars of sustainability.
-However, from an exclusively environmental sustainability approach, it remains to be seen if
current climate change focalization, through CF reporting, will be maintained, or if it will be
expanded to cover other environmental issues such as impacts related to land use change (BSI,
2011b; IPCC, 2006).
-Parallelly, a widespread use of the CF in combination with other single-issue indicators would be
recommended to increase transparency and impacts coverage, avoid value judgments and
arbitrary weighing and promote integrated perspectives.
-While CF is an outstanding indicator for supply chain improvements and enterprise
communications (internal and external), it seems less useful to evaluate strategies and take
decisions at macro scale.
-Finally, from a market supply and demand perspective, future standardization developments in
wine CF will start to provide feedback on the success or failure of eco-labeling dissemination
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strategies and how their implementation will influence consumer behavior and patterns.
Critical Issue for LCA-CFP
Finding Accurate data:
The sources for database creation
– identify as much work as
possible available on LCA
studies on wine, published
at national and international
level
– prepare
an
exhaustive
database with which to work
to evaluate the state of the
art of this study sector.
DATABASE
Of
WINE LCA
Scientific
database
University
library
database
Papers of
international
conferences
on LCA
Internet
for
“grey
literature”