Page 190 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

MODELING THE AGRI-FOOD INDUSTRY WITH LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT 175

using there is PIQET (Packaging Impact Quick Evaluation Tool) developed for
the ecodesign screening in the development phase of new food packaging, to
allow for the evaluation of packaging system scenarios. It used embedded LCI
data for all the phases of the packaging life cycle and combined it with packag-
ing specific indicators, such as product/packaging ratio, number of packaging
materials per format, in order to provide the designer with a comprehensive
assessment of the packaging environmental profile (Verghese, et ah 2010). Still
referring to packaging assessment, the Consumer Goods Forum, released in
April 2010 the Global Packaging Project; it is a document, which addresses the
need in the packaging industry for a common language to enable discussion
on sustainable packaging between business companies. The report delivers
a framework and measurement system that trading partners can use to help
them make better, more informed decisions regarding packaging and sustain-
ability (Consumer-Goods-Forum, 2010).
Nevertheless, the environmental impact deriving from packaging, in
general, is only a modest fraction of the overall impact deriving from the pack-
aged food product itself. In a few cases, such as wine making, bottling can
have a large and relevant impact. But on the whole, the LCA of food products
cannot have boundaries limited to an analysis of just the packaging. As has
been shown during the last twenty years of academic agri-food LCA studies,
it is not possible to exclude the assessment of the food itself - i.e. its impact in
the agricultural and zootechnical stages, in the factory processing, during con-
sumer use and the final disposal of the waste occurring in any of the phases,
possibly including also those of human digestion and excretion.
In this sense, and referring to tools designed to assess the whole agri-food
product system in industry with a systematic use of LCA, Selerant, an ICT
Italian company, within its web-based Product Life Cycle Management (PLM)
solution, called DevEX, is developing the Eco-Design Tool which aims to pro-
vide users with the capability to assess different packaged food product sys-
tem designs from a life cycle perspective. To achieve this goal, the ISO 14040
and 14044 norms served as the guiding standard methods while designing the
tool. The streamlined LCA tool is specifically designed for food and beverage
product system assessment and it is specifically implemented for use by a large
number of non-expert users such as food product technologists, designers,
environmental managers and salespersons. The companies that will be using
it, such as Nestle and others, of course go in the direction of the systematic and
routine use of LCA in product development. The limitations of the tool are
linked with all the methodological problems which have been described in the
previous paragraphs of this chapter and with the availability of specific-plant
and field data, since it currently works with Ecolnvent. However, every com-
pany has the possibility to upload its own database should it have one. This
issue has already been described and we believe it is one of the most urgent
aspects in modeling the agri-food industry with LCA: availability of corpo-
rate specific databases. A data collection system has to be built up and data
for all the fields and the plants belonging to the corporate products supply
chain should be collected and modelled. It is a pretentious and a resource-time