Decreasing the Environmental Impact in an Egg-Producing Farm through the Application of LCA and Lean Tools

Abstract

Intensive poultry farming transforms vegetable protein into animal protein through shelf egg and chicken meat production. Mexico is the largest egg consumer and fifth-ranked egg producer worldwide. However, the environmental impact of egg production in this country is scarcely reported. This research aimed to design an eco-efficient approach for egg production in a semi-technified farm based on door-to-door life cycle assessment (LCA) and value stream mapping (VSM) methodologies. The LCA points out that the climate change category is a hotspot in egg production, with emissions of 5.58 kg CO 2 eq/kg per egg produced. The implementation of an eco-efficient scheme focused on energy usage could result in a 49.5% reduction of total energy consumption and 56.3% saving in environmental impacts. Likewise, by using an environmental economic evaluation system, it is identified that the eco-efficient scheme allows more sustainable production through the internalization of externalities. From an environmental-economic point of view, externalities-that is, those environmental damages that are not initially considered part of the production cost-were included, meaning they were internalized. The integral framework for LCA and VSM provides a possible path for sustainable productivity.

The Lean Farm: Application of Tools and Concepts of Lean Manufacturing in Agro-Pastoral Crops

“…Estrada-González et al [61] conducted a study in the egg producti We realized that the philosophical principle had an adherence of 80%; processes, 94.3%; employers and partners, 66.6%; and problem-solving, 86.6%, highlighting the importance of working on leadership development projects and integration with suppliers.…”

“…Estrada-González et al [61] conducted a study in the egg production industry in Mexico, wherein they apply the concepts of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and value stream mapping (VSM) to reduce environmental impacts and consumption of energy through the use and reuse of waste from the production process.…”

“…All the evaluated publications presented positive results in the evaluated indicators supported by applying the tools. The five LP tools most applied were VSM [54,55,58,59,61,[63][64][65]67], 5S [54,56], Standardized Operation Procedure (SOP) [54,56], Flow Chart [15,63,65], SMED [54,65].…”

A Methodological Approach to Designing Circular Economy Indicators for Agriculture: An Application to the Egg Sector

“…The links are given weights according to the connection: strong link (**), weak link (*), no link ( ) [41]. Performance indicators (PI) are identified for each DV using the literature [1,4,6,9,13,14,30,33,[45][46][47]49,[51][52][53][54]. A set of 36 PIs have been identified for 14 DVs, based on information taken from the above-mentioned literature.…”

Eggs or meat? Environmental impact and efficiency assessment of chicken protein production with potential of Hermetia illucens use in feed

“…Produced eggs were packaged in eggboxes with 10 eggs per box. Packaging material was linerboard (Estrada-González et al, 2020). Occurred manure in both laying hens and broiler chicken production was sold as fertilizer (Dekker et al, 2011;González-García et al, 2014).…”