Carbon and water footprint of pork supply chain in Catalonia: From feed to final products
| Autor: | Joan Colón, Sara González-García, Maria Teresa Moreira, Sergio Ponsá, Isabel Roman, Jesús Boschmonart-Rives, Eudald Casas, Carles M. Gasol, Maria José Amores, Miguel A. Rubio, I. Noya, Xavier Aldea |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
Greenhouse Effect
Conservation of Natural Resources Engineering Environmental Engineering Swine Supply chain 010501 environmental sciences Management Monitoring Policy and Law 01 natural sciences Agricultural science Animals Production (economics) Environmental impact assessment Animal Husbandry Waste Management and Disposal Carbon Footprint 0105 earth and related environmental sciences Models Statistical business.industry Impact assessment Water Pollution Environmental engineering Reproducibility of Results 04 agricultural and veterinary sciences General Medicine Animal Feed Meat Products Spain Greenhouse gas 040103 agronomy & agriculture Carbon footprint Food Technology 0401 agriculture forestry and fisheries business Water use Environmental indicator |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Environmental Management. 171:133-143 |
| ISSN: | 0301-4797 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.jenvman.2016.01.039 |
| Popis: | A systematic tool to assess the Carbon Footprint (CF) and Water Footprint (WF) of pork production companies was developed and applied to representative Catalan companies. To do so, a cradle-to-gate environmental assessment was carried out by means of the LCA methodology, taking into account all the stages involved in the pork chain, from feed production to the processing of final products, ready for distribution. In this approach, the environmental results are reported based on eight different functional units (FUs) according to the main pork products obtained. With the aim of ensuring the reliability of the results and facilitating the comparison with other available reports, the Product Category Rules (PCR) for Catalan pork sector were also defined as a basis for calculations. The characterization results show fodder production as the main contributor to the global environmental burdens, with contributions higher than 76% regardless the environmental indicator or the life cycle stage considered, which is in agreement with other published data. In contrast, the results in terms of CF and WF lay above the range of values reported elsewhere. However, major discrepancies are mainly due to the differences in the co-products allocation criteria. In this sense, economic/physical allocation and/or system expansion have been mostly considered in literature. In contrast, no allocation was considered appropriate in this study, according to the characteristics of the industries and products under assessment; thus, the major impacts fall on the main product, which derives on comparatively higher environmental burdens. Finally, due to the relevance of fodder production in the overall impact assessment results, strategies to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions as well as water use associated to this stage were proposed in the pork supply chain. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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