Environmental life cycle assessment of Norway lobster (Nephrops norvegicus) caught along the Swedish west coast by creels and conventional trawls—LCA methodology with case study

Abstract

Background, aim, and scope Two fishing methods, creeling and conventional trawling, are used to target Norway lobster (Nephrops norvegicus), economically the second most important species in Swedish west coast fisheries. The goal was to evaluate overall resource use and environmental impact caused by production of this seafood with the two different fishing methods using life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. Materials and methods The inventory covered the entire chain starting by production of supply materials and the fishery itself, through seafood auctioning, wholesaling, retailing, to the consumer. That portion of the life cycle occurring on land was assumed to be identical for Norway lobsters regardless as to how they were caught. The functional unit was 300 g of edible meat (i.e., Norway lobster tails), corresponding to 1 kg of whole, boiled Norway lobsters. The seafloor impact of trawling was quantified using a recently developed methodology. Results Major differences were found between the fishing methods with regard to environmental impact: creeling was found to be more efficient than conventional trawling in all traditional impact categories and in the two additional fishery-related categories involving seafloor impact and discarding. Since the quality of the creel-caught Nephrops was higher, the difference was probably even higher than indicated here. Discussion Major improvement potential was identified in the more widespread use of creels and species-selective trawls. The only deficiencies of creel fishing were poorer working environment and safety, and a potentially higher risk of recruitment overfishing. However, these issues could be handled by technological development and fisheries regulations and should not hamper the development of creel fishery. Conclusions Improvement options were identified and quantified for the Swedish Nephrops fishery. The study demonstrates how LCA can be used to compare the environmental performance of different segments of a fishery. Recommendations and perspectives Shifting to creeling and species-selective trawling would lead to considerably lower discard, fuel use, and seafloor impact while providing consumers with the same amount of Norway lobsters.

Combined application of life cycle assessment and data envelopment analysis as a methodological approach for the assessment of fisheries

“…Finally, this section highlights the benefits of using this extended method for LCA. These benefits refer mainly to the inclusion of issues for which wellestablished impact assessment methods have not been developed (Pelletier et al 2007), such as the consideration of by-catch and discards in fisheries (Ziegler et al 2003;Ziegler and Valentinsson 2008).…”

“…The specific software used for the computational implementation of the LCIs was SimaPro 7 (Goedkoop et al 2008) using CML baseline 2000 as the environmental impact assessment method. In this particular study, six impact categories were taken into account, excluding the toxicity and ecotoxicity impact categories due to the uncertainties in the results (Ziegler and Valentinsson 2008). The impact categories included were abiotic depletion potential (ADP), global warming potential (GWP), photochemical oxidant formation potential (POFP), eutrophication potential (EP), acidification potential (AP), and ozone layer depletion potential (ODP).…”

Towards a meaningful assessment of marine ecological impacts in life cycle assessment (LCA)

“…These recovery times were obtained from the MarLIN database, which provides a systematic ranking of habitat recoverability as a result of physical disturbances per habitat type (MarLIN, 2015) and defines recovery of a habitat as the re-growth, re-colonization or re-establishment of viability (Tyler-Walters et al, 2001). Impacts are not quantified; rather spatially explicit maps of fishing effort per habitat type are compared to the habitat-specific recovery time to obtain an indication of the seabed area that is in a persistently disturbed condition (Ziegler and Valentinsson, 2008). Foden et al (2010) quantified the impact of three types of bottomtrawling on the UK seabed.…”

“…LCA is particularly well-suited to identify potential trade-offs that occur across impact categories or life-cycle stages and consequently offers the possibility to optimize the overall environmental performance of a product or process. These key advantages have resulted in an increased LCA application to various technologies in the last decade (Guinée et al, 2011), including several sea-based technologies, such as offshore oil and gas production (Veltman et al, 2011), offshore wind turbines (Weinzettel et al, 2009), marine capture fisheries (Avadí and Fréon, 2013;Pelletier et al, 2007;Ziegler and Valentinsson, 2008) and marine aquaculture (Aubin et al, 2009). LCA, however, was originally developed to assess the impact of land-based product systems on mainly terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and currently lacks a marine impact focus.…”

SENSE tool: easy-to-use web-based tool to calculate food product environmental impact

“…ISO 14044:2006 leaves different options for this task, such as system expansion, mass allocation, or economic allocation. v. Impact methodology selection: There are still many impacts that are not being considered in the life cycle thinking such as loss of biodiversity (Curran 2010), discards (Vazquez-Rowe et al 2012a), and damages to the marine seafloor (Ziegler and Valentinsson 2008). The globalization of the production systems forces the creation of some impact characterization factors according to the conditions in each region (Pfister 2013).…”