Water and Carbon Footprint of Wine: Methodology Review and Application to a Case Study

Abstract

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) play a strategic role in improving the environmental performance of a company and in supporting a successful marketing communication. The high impact of the food industry on natural resources, in terms of water consumption and greenhouse gases emission, has been focusing the attention of consumers and producers towards environmentally sustainable products. This work presents a comprehensive approach for the joint evaluation of carbon (CF) and water (WF) footprint of the wine industry from a cradle to grave perspective. The LCA analysis is carried out following the requirements of international standards (ISO/TS 14067 and ISO 14046). A complete review of the water footprint methodology is presented and guidelines for all the phases of the evaluation procedure are provided, including acquisition and validation of input data, allocation, application of analytic models, and interpretation of the results. The strength of this approach is the implementation of a side-by-side CF vs. WF assessment, based on the same system boundaries, functional unit, and input data, that allows a reliable comparison between the two indicators. In particular, a revised methodology is presented for the evaluation of the grey water component. The methodology was applied to a white and a red wine produced in the same company. A comparison between the two products is presented for each LCA phase along with literature results for similar wines.

Life Cycle Assessment Application to the Wine Sector: A Critical Review

“…The green water footprint (WF green ) is the volume of rainwater evapotranspirated and incorporated by the process [17]. The most used method for its calculation is FAO methodology, which is the standard procedure for calculating crop evapotranspiration [39]. Both WF blue and WF green are real volumes.…”

Millennial Generation and Environmental Sustainability: The Role of Social Media in the Consumer Purchasing Behavior for Wine

“…Although age is a control variable generally used in the consumer behavior studies [52,59], we decided not to include it because we are already analyzing two sub-samples characterized by different ages: millennials (18-35 years) and non-millennials (36-88 years).…”

“…In a study on Canadian wineries, Berghoef and Dodds [50] included among environmental concerns the reduction in water use and the appropriate treatment of waste water. Finally, greenhouse gas emissions (carbon footprint) generated across the wine supply chain are an important indicator used to evaluate the environmental impact, especially in the context of global climate change [18,26,58,59].…”

Assessing Green and Blue Water Footprints in the Supply Chain of Cocoa Production: A Case Study in the Northeast of Colombia

“…Losses occur when water evaporates, returns to another catchment area or the sea or is incorporated into a product. The green WF refers to consumption of green water resources (rainwater insofar as it does not become run-off); however, the non-consumptive part of water withdrawals (the return flow) is not part of the WF [19][20][21]. This water fraction is usually represented by the amount of precipitated water that is consumed by the crop during its entire productive life [22].…”