The environmental consequences of food production and consumption have gained a lot of attention in recent years. From the first applications of life cycle approaches to agriculture in the 1970s, it has successively evolved to the consideration of the whole food chain. As more and more LCA data on single food products became available, some studies considered the impacts of different meals or full diets. More recently, environmental considerations were aligned with the analysis of other aspects of nutrition such as health (Tilman and Clark 2014) or other wider sustainability aspects including the social and economic dimensions.
A simplified web-based tool should enable small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in the food and drink sector to calculate the environmental impacts of their products. It has been developed in the European project SENSE (Ramos et al. 2015). For this purpose, cooperation with and data entry by suppliers is necessary. Data for key environmental performance indicators must be collected to calculate ten environmental impact category indicators. The SENSE tool can be used for (i) environmental impact assessment of the product, (ii) food chain hot spot identification, (iii) comparison of hypothetical or real improvement scenarios, (iv) assessment of the environmental impact development over the years, (v) benchmarking opportunity for the companies, and (vi) a business to business communication strategy.
Environmental Life Cycle Assessment: Measuring The Environmental Performance Of Products Rita Schenc
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Eberle and Fels (2015) analyzed the environmental impacts of German food consumption and food losses. The losses made up between 11 and 17 % of the environmental impacts of in-house food consumption; for out-of-home food consumption they were even more important with 28 to 33 % losses, depending on the impact category. The life cycle phases agriculture and consumption caused the highest impacts; together they were responsible for over 87 % of the total environmental burdens. Animal products had a relatively high share in the total impacts. The study showed that food production and consumption as well as food losses along the value chain are important drivers of environmental impacts.
Gruber et al. (2015) showed that substantial reduction of environmental impacts could be achieved through the reduction of food losses. Main food losses occur in the consumer phase. Three different types of consumer behavior were modeled: baseline, environmentally conscious and careless. This resulted in considerable differences in the total life cycle impacts, which shows how the environmental impact of food consumption can be reduced by an environmentally conscious consumer. Important improvement potentials have been identified during shopping, in the reduction of electricity consumption for food storage or preparation and by avoiding wasting of food. The authors emphasize the importance of including the consumer stage in LCAs of food products.
There are three ways to address the environmental impacts of nutrition and food consumption: with a single environmental issue (e.g., carbon or water footprint), by discussing several midpoint impact categories separately (e.g., ILCD) or by weighting several impact categories into a final single score at the endpoint (e.g., ReCiPe, ecological scarcity). Each of these approaches has pros and cons and the choice depends on the goal and scope of each study. The use of a single environmental issue is the easiest approach. It needs less data in the life cycle inventory analysis as several types of emissions or resource uses need not be accounted for. The interpretation of results is much easier as there is one type of result and no diverging results for several indicators. Many studies focus on a single environmental issue, which is mostly the climate impact assessed by the carbon footprint methodology (Auestad and Fulgoni 2015; Heller et al. 2013). This choice is driven by the high relevance and attention to the issue in the public debate, the relatively important share of the food sector in greenhouse gas emissions, and the good availability of data. The contributions to this special issue confirm this finding. While carbon footprint is undoubtedly of high environmental relevance and gives a first important insight into the impact of nutrition on the environment, it is clearly insufficient to describe the full range of environmental impacts of food systems. Some studies assess the use of fossil energy only, which was found to be a good indicator for the total environmental impact in general, but notably with the main exception of agricultural products (Huijbregts et al. 2010). Agricultural production has a number of environmental impacts not related to fossil energy use or climate impacts. Important examples are the impacts on biodiversity, soil quality, water resources, nutrient emissions to water (mainly nitrogen and phosphorus), or toxic impacts on ecosystems through pesticides and other pollutants such as heavy metals. Jungbluth et al. (2011) showed that the nutrition of the Swiss population is responsible for 12 % of the non-renewable energy use, while it generates 17 % of the global warming potential and 29 % of the total environmental impact assessed by the Swiss ecological scarcity method 2006. Similar trends were found in a European study (Tukker and Jansen 2006). These examples clearly show that considering merely fossil energy or greenhouse gas emissions is not sufficient to address the range of environmental impacts of nutrition, since the impacts related to agricultural production in general dominate the impacts of nutrition (Foster et al. 2006). ISO standards 14040 and 14044 (ISO 2006a, b) require the assessment of all relevant environmental impacts by discussing results for several impact categories (e.g., according to ENVIFOOD (2012)) and the tools and databases to implement this are available. Thus, we see an important challenge to consider all relevant environmental impacts also in the assessment of diets and food styles.
Contrary to many other economic sectors, the food sector is strongly dependent on land use, with the main exception of seafood, which is of course dependent on sea area or volume. The availability of land with high suitability to agricultural production as well as water available for irrigation put a serious constraint on global and local food production (Fischer et al. 2010). Increasing the agricultural production area has strong environmental impacts; this constrained resource availability, compounded with the increased demand from the growing world population, challenges future agricultural production. Changes in food production systems or diets have consequences on other food systems or related sectors, such as biofuel production and vice versa. Direct and indirect land use change may have a strong effect on the impacts of food products and diets. UNEP-IRP (2014) assesses land as a resource and suggests several options to a sustainable land use, including: (i) Reducing excessive food consumption, notably by reducing food waste and shifting to more plant-based diets in high meat consuming countries. (ii) Restoration of degraded soils and avoiding building activities on fertile land. (iii) Promote research and extension of best agricultural practices to maintain soil quality, increase yield, and thus reduce pressure for deforestation. (iv) More efficient use of biomass and its substitutes through better cooperation to improve supply chains, better communication between manufacturers and consumers, enhanced international efforts toward global resource management (e.g., toward soil restoration), and a better framework for sustainable resource management at the scale of countries, regions, and cities. (v) Decoupling markets for food and fuel. In addition, certification schemes may play a significant role in driving the uptake of sustainable agriculture practices if coupled with performance indicators that demonstrate their positive effects through the value chain. Adequate indicators for land use impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services are required (Koellner et al. 2013) to provide a basis to develop land use strategies, with enough granularity capable of differentiating sustainable agriculture practices such as those promoted by certification schemes.
Agriculture and the food sector are key drivers of environmental and social impacts worldwide, but they may also hold the key for the contribution of the economy to reduced impacts, enhanced biodiversity and ecosystem services, and improved livelihoods. LCA and life cycle thinking more generally have the potential to identify more sustainable business models in food production and consumption systems. This paper and special issue provide some clear directions for the methodological research and implementation needs to achieve such more sustainable food systems.
Due to the high consumption of coffee, both producers and consumers could be subjected to health risks due to pesticides in coffee, so attention should be drawn to the safety of coffee. A recent study proved that the exposure to pesticides increases the mortality risk for patients diagnosed with Parkinson's disease (28). Yet, more cases are to be considered to explain the reasons. Another detailed survey in Tanzania showed that acute pesticide poisoning (APP) is a health threat that is leading to an increase in the death rate for those exposed to pesticides (29). In proving the relation between the risk of hormonal exposure and risk of Parkinson's disease among postmenopausal women, the exposure to pesticides was among the factors. That is, women who were farmers or lived near farms where pesticides were used had a higher percentage of having Parkinson's disease with respect to control cases (30). Preclinical evidence proved the action of certain pesticides to increase the risk of Parkinson's. Dieldrin is an organochlorine that is widely used as an insecticide. This pesticide has been linked to neural apoptosis (31). Rotenone behaves as a neurotoxin as well. Moreover, the negative impact of pesticides is not restricted only to the farmers or consumers, but also on the future of coffee wastewater (CWW). A recent critical review showed how the use of the CWW after proper treatment could be beneficial economically and environmentally except for the minimal residues of pesticides that threaten the aquatic life even if present as trace amounts (32). This has been already confirmed in older studies showing the phytotoxicity and cytogenotoxicity in coffee wastewater (33) given that trials and attempts to remove these pesticides were initiated in 2013 and showed unsatisfactory results (34). Using coffee residues might be a way to generate extra income for coffee growers helping them offset production costs. The latter is subject to the use of pesticides. As 80 % of the population in Ethiopia depends on agriculture using uncontrolled amounts of pesticides, concerns were raised recently, and consequently, many studies in this regard have been initiated emphasizing the pesticide-related health and environmental risks. To estimate risk and develop solutions, a recent study based on an electronic database was conducted specifically on the direct use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). The data showed DDT was detected in soil, surface water, and human breast milk indicating the direct use of DDT on food crops. Moreover, this is a sign of chronic health risk to the public harming fish, bees, soil organisms, and wildlife. Hence, misuse of pesticides can lead to interruption of the entire life cycle (35). This study was a call for the necessity of raising awareness to reduce the risks resulting from pesticides' misuse. be457b7860
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