Life cycle assessment in the food supply chain: a case study

Abstract

This research aims at assessing the environmental impact of the poultry supply chain from cradle to grave using case study research and also life cycle assessment (LCA). While a limited number of generic poultry production LCA studies have been published, fewer yet assess the whole process of a specific organisation, none comparing the increased impact of further processing. Our results show that irrespectively of the impact assessment method utilised, the process of producing portions is considerably higher in total environmental impact due to the extra raw material required to produce the same mass into retail. Our research contributes to the growing number of LCA studies and could be used by practitioners for comparison against national and international averages. From a theoretical point of view, this research provides new insights into the relationship between vertically integrated supply chains and environmental performance which has not been examined in the past.

Are Short Food Supply Chains More Environmentally Sustainable than Long Chains? A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the Eco-Efficiency of Food Chains in Selected EU Countries

“…The literature does contain examples of LCA-based eco-efficiency analysis of supply chains, although rather narrowly focused on single products and differently defined system boundaries, with a strong focus on production processes [69,114]. Such studies prove the applicability of the LCA methodology for assessing the environmental performance of food supply chains, providing a clear rationale for our work.…”

“…LCA-based eco-efficiency assessments of entire food supply chains are limited so far and are related mainly to single products. Usually, these analyses do not focus on the distribution chains themselves, but on the entire life cycle of agricultural and food products, covering agricultural production and the processing phase [11,18,19,69,70].…”

Rethinking sustainability in seafood

“…We compared our climate forcing per unit tuna protein to the greenhouse gas emissions of other farmed protein sources including livestock (chicken, pork, and beef), farmed fish (salmon and prawns), and plant-based proteins (legumes and tofu) from a literature review (Blonk et al, 2008;Katajajuuri et al, 2008;Cao et al, 2011;Head et al, 2011;Ziegler et al, 2013;Farmery et al, 2015;McCarthy et al, 2015;Santos et al, 2015;Smetana et al, 2015;Teah et al, 2015;Clune et al, 2017). We normalized the greenhouse gas emissions per unit protein on 20-and 100-year time horizons (see Text S5 for details).…”

Identification of Supply Chain Performance Indicators: Case Study of Costa Rican Coffee Production

“…"Social indicators can sometimes not be quantified and are often prone to subjectivity" [30] and there is limited availability of solid indicators. However, like economic and environmental indicators, some social indicators are used in different approaches [31,32,33]. Regarding the possibilities of application in the coffee supply chain, the social indicators applied in this work are derived from the SLCA which enables the user to get a holistic account of the social impact in contrast to other social assessment methodologies [33].…”