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Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) has long been utilized for decision making about the sustainability of products. LCA provides information about the total emissions generated for a given functional unit of a product, which is utilized by industries or consumers for comparing two products with regards to environmental performance. However, many existing LCAs utilize data that is representative of an average system with regards to life cycle stage, thus providing an aggregate picture. It has been shown that regional variation may lead to large variation in the environmental impacts of a product, specifically dealing with energy consumption, related emissions and resource consumptions. Hence, improving the reliability of LCA results for decision making with regards to environmental performance needs regional models to be incorporated for building a life cycle inventory that is representative of the origin of products from a certain region. In this work, we present the integration of regionalized data from process systems models and other sources to build regional LCA models and quantify the spatial variations per unit of biodiesel produced in the state of Indiana for environmental impact. In order to include regional variation, we have incorporated information about plant capacity for producing biodiesel from North and Central Indiana. The LCA model built is a cradle-to-gate. Once the region-specific models are built, the data were utilized in SimaPro to integrate with upstream processes to perform a life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). We report the results per liter of biodiesel from northern and central Indiana facilities in this work. The impact categories studied were global warming potential (kg CO2 eq) and freshwater eutrophication (kg P eq). While there were a lot of variations at individual county level, both regions had a similar global warming potential impact and the northern region had relatively lower eutrophication impacts.
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Environmental Impact Assessment of Agricultural Production Using LCA: A Review
Life cycle impact assessment (LCA) provides a better understanding of the energy, water, and material input and evaluates any production system’s output impacts. LCA has been carried out on various crops and products across the world. Some countries, however, have none or only a few studies. Here, we present the results of a literature review, following the PRISMA protocol, of what has been done in LCA to help stakeholders in these regions to understand the environmental impact at different stages of a product. The published literature was examined using the Google Scholar database to synthesize LCA research on agricultural activities, and 74 studies were analyzed. The evaluated papers are extensively studied in order to comprehend the various impact categories involved in LCA. The study reveals that tomatoes and wheat were the major crops considered in LCA. The major environmental impacts, namely, human toxicity potential and terrestrial ecotoxicity potential, were the major focus. Furthermore, the most used impact methods were CML, ISO, and IPCC. It was also found that studies were most often conducted in the European sector since most models and databases are suited for European agri-food products. The literature review did not focus on a specific region or a crop. Consequently, many studies appeared while searching using the keywords. Notwithstanding such limitations, this review provides a valuable reference point for those practicing LCA.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1735235
- PAR ID:
- 10350843
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Climate
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 2225-1154
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 164
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/cli9110164
