IMPROVING ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY OF THE AGRO-FOOD SECTOR THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF THE LCA METHODOLOGY

Over the last years, the interest in the environmental impacts associated with food systems has strongly grown. Several works have confirmed the relative importance of “food and beverages consumption” in contributing to environmental impacts. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, livestock accounts for 18% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. In the EU, food consumption accounts for 20-30% of various environmental impacts and, in the case of eutrophication, more than 50%. Consumers are now changing their behaviour to integrate environmental considerations into lifestyle choices. The environmental aspect is now one of the variables taken into consideration by consumers during the purchasing process. LCA provides a methodological framework, a supporting tool for evaluating and improving the environmental performance of food systems. Given the importance of the environmental aspects associated with goods production, and being food consumption one of the major causes for resource use and environmental impact by modern households, the focus of this work has been the application of the LCA methodology to agro-food products in order to: 1. Depict the environmental profile of some food products, identifying the environmental hotspots associated with their production; 2. Evaluate different technical solutions in a chain optimisation perspective The following products/processes have been evaluated: wine, cereals (maize, wheat, triticale and rice), fresh-cut salad, pasta cooking. The case studies presented in this work provide a clear demonstration of how LCA can be used on agro-food products to identify environmental hotspots and evaluate possible ameliorative solutions. In the light of increasing the sustainability of food production, it is in fact crucial, on the one hand, to measure the impacts produced by food products and identify the most critical phases on which intervene to obtain relevant improvements and, on the other hand, to quantify such improvements, assessing different alternative solutions.