From beans to bar: A life cycle assessment towards sustainable chocolate supply chain

Abstract

The environmental sustainability has emerged as a crucial aspect in the agri-food sector, nevertheless environmental assessments and certifications of cocoa and chocolate are still missing. Given this gap and the increasing global demand for cocoa derivatives, this study aims to evaluate the environmental impacts of an Italian dark chocolate through a holistic cradle-to-grave Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The impact categories assessed are acidification potential (AC), eutrophication potential (EU), global warming potential (GW), photochemical ozone creation potential (POC), ozone layer depletion potential (OD), abiotic depletion (AD) and cumulative energy demand (CED). The obtained results highlight the relevant contributions of upstream phase (63% for the ODP, 92% for EU and 99% for the AD) and core processes (39% for the GW and 49% for the CED) on the overall impacts. Specifically, cocoa provisioning and energy supply at the manufacturing plant emerged as environmental hotspots and have been deeper investigated through a sensitivity analysis. Obtained outcomes show the significant variability of the environmental impacts due to the agricultural phase (i.e., depending on agroecosystems and practices) and environmental benefits guaranteed by an efficient trigeneration system implemented in the manufacturing plant. The quantification of the environmental impacts of chocolate through LCA, the identification of the main hotspots along the supply chain and the sensitivity analysis performed in this study could effectively support chocolate companies in their pathway towards environmentally sustainable productions.

Environmental impacts of chocolate production and consumption in the UK

“…Breakdown of the chocolate confectionary sector in the UK by market value (Key Note, 2015) So far, there have been few other studies of environmental impacts of chocolates. Most of these focused on dark chocolate, with two studies based in Italy (Recanati et al, 2018;Vesce et al, 2016), one in Ecuador (Perez Neira, 2016) and one in Europe in general (Busser & Jungbluth, 2009). The last also considered milk chocolate in aluminium packaging.…”

Environmental management of confectionery products: Life cycle impacts and improvement strategies

“…In comparison to previous studies (Recanati et al, 2018;Vesce et al, 2016;Jungbluth and Konig, 2014), there are several key methodological differences which improves our understanding of the environmental sustainability of confectionery products. These are: (1) a range of products representing the core product categories found in the confectionery sector, (2) full confectionery supply chain analysis from cradle-tograve, (3) inclusion of pre-processing stages for chocolate pre- cursors, (4) inclusion of food and packaging waste, (5) five environmental impact categories (GWP, water depletion, ADP, land use and ecosystems quality) which are more aligned with metrics used in the food industry, and (6) multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to aggregate environmental impacts to aid decisionmaking.…”

“…In particular, the dark chocolate confectionery products and biscuit-based products presented in the work is significantly different from Racanati et al (2018), Jungbluth and Konig (2014) and Konstantas et al (2017a). For the dark chocolate confectionery, it was found the difference between Recanati et al (2018) and the work produced in this research was due to different recipes e.g. higher sugar content and dairy products.…”

“…An attributional process Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was adopted to evaluate the environmental impacts of different confectionery products by following the ISO 14040/14044 methodology (ISO, 2006;Bauman and Tillman, 2004;Sadhukhan et al, 2014). In comparison to previous studies (Recanati et al, 2018;Vesce et al, 2016;Jungbluth and Konig, 2014), the novel features of the proposed LCA methodology adopted are:…”

“…Currently, there are a range of disparate studies investigating the environmental impacts of different types of confectionery products by an advance systems analysis tool known as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) (Recanati et al, 2018;Konstantas et al, 2017a;Nilsson et al, 2011). For example, a comparison of the existing studies shown in Table 1 reveals major differences and limitations, such as; (1) single product analysis (primarily chocolate) which only provides a limited representation of the diverse confectionery products found in the confectionery industry (Recanati et al, 2018;Konstantas et al, 2017a;Nilsson et al, 2011), (2) inconsistent system boundaries which omit parts of the supply chain resulting in inaccurate environmental impacts (Wallen et al, 2004), (3) lack of environmental impacts categories which do not provide a balanced overview of impacts, especially the impacts associated across the confectionery production e land e water e and energy nexus (Vesce et al, 2016;Jungbluth and Konig, 2014;Nilsson et al, 2011), (4) outdated data (Recanati et al, 2018;Vesce et al, 2016), and (5) limited-to-none improvement strategies to demonstrate effective improvements to prioritise across the confectionery supply chain (Recanati et al, 2018;Jungbluth and Konig, 2014;Ntiamoah and Afrane, 2008).…”