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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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This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2025
Spatially Explicit Life Cycle Global Warming and Eutrophication Potentials of Confined Dairy Production in the Contiguous US
Assessing the spatially explicit life cycle environmental impacts of livestock production systems is critical for understanding the spatial heterogeneity of environmental releases and devising spatially targeted remediation strategies. This study presents the first spatially explicit assessment on life cycle global warming and eutrophication potentials of confined dairy production at a county scale in the contiguous US. The Environmental Policy Integrated Climate model was used to estimate greenhouse gases (GHGs), NH3, and aqueous nutrient releases of feed production. The Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation model and Commodity Flow Survey were used to assess GHGs and NH3 from feed transportation. Emission-factor-based approaches were primarily used to calculate GHGs from enteric fermentation, and GHGs, NH3, and aqueous nutrient releases from manure management. Characterization factors reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Tool for Reduction and Assessment of Chemicals and other Environmental Impacts model were used to compute global warming and eutrophication potentials, respectively. The analyses revealed that life cycle global warming and eutrophication potentials of confined dairy production presented significant spatial heterogeneity among the US counties. For example, the life cycle global warming potential ranged from 462 kg CO2-eq/head to 14,189 kg CO2-eq/head. Surprisingly, sourcing feed locally cannot effectively reduce life cycle global warming and eutrophication potentials of confined dairy production. The feed supply scenarios with the lowest life cycle environmental impacts depend on the life cycle environmental impacts of feed production, geographic locations of confined dairy production, and specific impact categories. In addition, installing buffer strips in feed-producing hotspots can effectively reduce life cycle nutrient releases of confined dairy production. If 200 counties with the highest life cycle EP of corn adopt buffer strips, the reduction in life cycle EP of confined dairy production could reach 24.4%.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2115405
- PAR ID:
- 10637715
- Publisher / Repository:
- Environments
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environments
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 2076-3298
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 230
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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