Page 175 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

160 LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT HANDBOOK

Parliament via the Regulation (EC) No. 66 regarding the EU Ecolabel, extended
the possibility of using the EU Ecolabel in all sectors for which environmental
impact is a factor in consumer choice, by stating also that for food and feed
product groups, a study should be undertaken to ensure that criteria are feasi-
ble and that added value can be guaranteed. To complete this framework, a call
for tender titled "EU Ecolabel for food and feed products - feasibility study"
(ENV.C1/ETU/2010/0025) was published. At the same time, in the Strategic
Research Agenda 2006-2020 (Ohlsson, et al. 2006), the European Technology
Platforms Food for Life has defined sustainable food production as the most
important challenge that will be faced by the European food industry An out-
come of this process is the recently published FP7 Call for 2011 under the theme
Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE/Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and
Biotechnology), especially KBBE.2011.2.5-01 Environmental sustainability in
the European food and drink chain. The International Environmental Product
Declaration (EPD) system until now has been applied to more than thirty food
systems with about twenty-five Product Category Rules (PCRs) in the Food
and Drink sector. Moreover, new labels and statements have been introduced
by different authorities.
To help find a possible direction for sustainable food production and con-
sumption, sustainability tools and LCA have been applied for more than fif-
teen years to agricultural and food systems, identifying their environmental
impacts throughout their life cycle and supporting environmental decision
making. A variety of databases and methodological approaches have been
outlined over this period to support the applications of LCA to food systems;
the number of participants in international conferences on Food LCA have
doubled (Notarnicola, 2011), the number of publications on Food LCAs on
international scientific journals has increased by about five times in the last
eight years (Curran & Huisingh, 2010), specific books have been published
and specific European Technology platforms, working groups and Round
Tables have been established. Moreover, multinational food companies are
adopting Life Cycle Management and Industrial Ecology tools in the design
of their products for the minimisation of the correlated environmental impacts
throughout the life cycle.
At an institutional level there are the European Food SCP Round Table and
the Sustainability Consortium which are currently developing a harmonized
LCA framework methodology. Moreover many academic studies regarding
LCA of the agri-food system have been carried out. Such studies, at an impact
level, consider mostly energy use, eutrophication, acidification, global warm-
ing, tropospheric ozone formation and land use. Generally, the results indi-
cate that the agriculture stage has the highest impact during the life cycle with
eutrophication, acidification and land use being the most significant catego-
ries. Also, in general, animal products, as opposed to vegetable foods, have the
highest energy use (Peacock, et al. 2011). The impact from packaging depends
on the materials and end-of-life treatment options used, while transporta-
tion can have a high impact especially when airfreight is used. As far as sea-
food systems are concerned, fuel use is the cause of the major impacts; other