Page 192 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

MODELING THE AGRI-FOOD INDUSTRY WITH LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT 177

of the comprehensiveness principle which requires the consideration of all the
impact categories or aspects relative to the natural environment, human health
and resources (Finkbeiner, 2009). Also, the development of other footprints
apart from the ecological footprint, such as water footprint, nitrogen footprint
and chemical footprints basically implies a return to the original principle of
a comprehensive LCA; therefore, it is not clear why we should move from
the LCA framework to another one which originated for one issue (global
warming) but then shifts to other issues, - water, nitrogen, chemicals etc. - by
re-proposing some of the well known unresolved problems of LCA, such as
trade off or weighting.
Finally, we would like to conclude this section by pointing out that, in
general, the use of LCA in the food industry has grown quickly in the last
decade. In this process the activities of central governments, especially for the
reduction of greenhouse gases (and this goes more in the direction of carbon
footprinting), the activities of the European Technology Platform (ETP) Food
for Life working groups, of the European food SCP round table and of the
Sustainability Consortium, have been very important. A few multinational
companies are working in terms of Life Cycle Thinking, with systematic and
routine use of LCA. Others are making use of it as a marketing tool in order to
obtain labels and certifications. Both approaches are important in order to use
LCA for real life decision making along the product sustainability pathway.
Nevertheless, the collection of specific company data regarding agricultural
fields and industrial plants are needed to build up corporate databases that
could also be made available to open source LCA software. At the moment,
this is not occurring, with the exception of very few initiatives, and, therefore,
it remains the main bottleneck for Food LCA.

7.4 Conclusions

The main methodological issues encountered in Food LCA include the choice
of functional unit, the definition of system boundaries, pesticide and fertilizer
dispersion models, land use, water use and the quality and availability of the
data used for the assessment.
In many LCA studies, regarding agri-food products, the choice of the func-
tional unit is based on the mass or volume. Since the main characteristic of food
is to carry out various functions via its various nutrients, it may be useful to
choose a set of different functional units for the analysed system. Furthermore,
in the definition of the functional unit of a food product, according to the objec-
tives of the study, aspects related to the various functions of the product should
also be included and, especially in comparative studies, the qualitative aspects
of the product need to be considered.
As far as defining system boundaries is concerned, many studies stop at the
farm gate; the agricultural stage is often partially assessed, without accounting
for the emissions which occur during the use of fertilizers and pesticides and
the consumer-use phase is often omitted, while these have significant impact;