Recently, our first crowdfunded project on a comparative LCA of RSPO certified and non-certified palm oil was finalized. The study shows that RSPO certified palm oil emits 35% less GHG emissions and is associated with 20% less impacts on biodiversity compared to non-certified palm oil. These results are valid for the average of Indonesia and Malaysia in 2016. However, palm oil producers (certified or not) are not static, and neither are the effect of certification on producers as well as the criteria for being certified. E.g. it is expected that GHG emissions are further reduced in the future as a larger share of especially certified palm oil mills will install biogas capture in the palm oil mill effluent (POME) treatment. Further, new RSPO criteria on no establishment of new oil palm on peat and no deforestation of high conservation value (HCV) land are expected to lead to lower the share of oil palm cultivation on peat and to higher shares of landbank set-aside as nature conservation.
Therefore, it is highly relevant to follow the development over time.
In additional to temporal differences in results, different countries and type of growers (estates and smallholders) will also have an influence on the impact of palm oil production. It is important to trace such differences in order to learn about the potential for improvement options in different producer segments.
Palm oil using companies are currently showcasing their contribution to GHG reductions due to their commitments of buying RSPO certified palm oil. They do this by using the results of our first crowdfunded project on the impact of RSPO certified palm oil for Indonesia and Malaysia in 2016. As the impact of RSPO certified versus non-certified palm oil is not static, it is important to consistently track the developments to make correct claims.
Become a partner of this project and contribute to the development of the next life cycle assessment (LCA) comparing RSPO certified palm oil to non-certified palm oil where results are tracked over time, per country and per type of grower (estates and smallholders).
The features of the project are:
The project was officially launched on 6th November 2019 with a platform presentation at the RSPO RT2019 conference in Bangkok. A scientific paper documenting the outcomes of the study will be submitted to a peer reviewed scientific journal in 2024.
Joining the new crowdfunded project will grant you access to all data and results, and you have access to influence the scope of the project.
The price of subscription is a one-time amount at 3,500 €. The funds from new subscriptions will be used to expand the scope of the project. For additional 2,000 € the results for a specific palm oil mill and its supply-base will be calculated and provided in a small report, including a comparison with the results of the main study.
For subscription (or questions), please contact us. To go to the club click here.
Economic assessments remain the dominating form of socio-economic assessment in agriculture; yet practical implementation often suffers from severe limitations. However, much of the early criticism has slowly been adopted and integrated in the form of significant improvements in the consistency and completeness of the economic assessment techniques. What remains is a better integration with the qualitative understandings developed in the social impact assessment community. This chapter is dedicated to impacts that are related to social and economic pressures, such as underpayment of labour, illegitimate resource acquisition and control, and inadequate work conditions. The author describes the development and state of the art of cost–benefit assessment and social impact assessment in agriculture (Sections 2–6) and their integration into models and tools with an economy-wide supply chain perspective (Section 7). Socio-economic impacts of agricultural development are covered in Sections 8–11. The final section considers the role of certification and fair-trade schemes.
A prerequisite to improving the sustainability of agriculture are reliable methods to identify and quantify types of environmental impact. This collection summarises current research on the use of life cycle assessment (LCA) and other modelling techniques to measure and improve the sustainability of agriculture.
Part 1 looks at current best practice and key methodological challenges in life cycle assessment. Part 2 reviews ways of modelling particular types of impact, from nutrient and carbon cycles to freshwater balances, energy use, pesticide use and biodiversity. Part 3 reviews the environmental assessment and optimization of sectors such as crops, ruminant and other livestock production as well as by-products.
Assessing the environmental impact of agriculture will be a standard reference for researchers in agricultural and environmental science concerned with understanding and mitigating the environmental impact of agriculture.
This report presents the life cycle inventory of Brewer’s grain, DDGS and milk replacer. The current report serves as an extended appendix to Schmidt and Dalgaard (2012) and Dalgaard and Schmidt (2012).
This work provides an unambiguous conceptual framework for inclusion of nutrition in Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) of food that enables the distinction between two different roles of nutrition, namely serving as the basis of food comparisons via the functional unit and as an impact pathway that links food ingestion with human health effects.
We compare how nutritional aspects have been considered in the functional unit of published LCAs of food with the procedural requirements for ensuring comparability of the functional units. We consider the relevance of nutrient profiling models for assessing food- and diet-related health damages and benefits in the context of LCAs of food. We finally recommend a method that will enable a systematic, comparative, and holistic assessment of the marginal health effect of food products on human health.
Satiety is proposed as a central attribute for comparisons of food products, while weighted measures of nutrient content are suggested to be largely misplaced as part of the functional unit. In contrast, nutritional measures have a large role to play in assessing the human health impacts of the marginal ingestion of specific food products. Such measures should enable a direct quantification of human health effect and benefits and should take advantage of robust epidemiological evidence.
Nutritional measures enter into both the functional unit in the form of satiety measures and into the calculation of impacts in the form of the marginal influence of the specific food item on the human health impact of the overall diet. To enhance the differentiation of health impacts at the level of individual food items, it is recommended to combine the nutrient balance indicator with the DALY Nutritional Index (DANI) in each specific dietary context.
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This report presents the executive summary of the first detailed life cycle assessment (LCA) study of palm oil production comparing the environmental impact of RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) certified sustainable palm oil with non- certified palm oil, as a cradle-to-gate LCA study. See project: LCA of Certified Palm Oil
This work provides a conceptual framework to distinguish between two different roles of nutrition in Life Cycle Assessment of foods, namely on the one hand in the functional unit that forms the basis of comparisons of foods, and on the other hand in the calculations of health impacts from ingestion of food products. Satiety is proposed as a central attribute for comparisons of food products, while weighted measures nutrient content are suggested to be largely misplaced as part of the functional unit. In contrast, nutritional measures have a large role to play in assessing the human health impacts of the marginal ingestion of specific food products for the more than half of the global population that lives on an unbalanced diet.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an increasingly used tool for environmental assessment of products and services, involving a comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts associated to supply chains, from a product’s ’cradle’ to its ’grave’. We present what to our knowledge constitutes the first LCA applied to chitin and chitosan production based on primary data from two real producers, located in Europe and India, respectively. Production in Europe corresponds to a chitosan for the medical sector, manufactured from chitin produced in China with shells from snow crab caught in teh Atlantic coast of Canada, whereas production in India corresponds to a general-purpose chitosan manufactured from chitin produced from shrimp shells caught in the Arabian Sea.The goal of the LCA was to understand the main ’hotspots’ in the two supply chains, which are substantially different in terms of raw materials and production locations. The product system for each supply chain included the production of raw materials, their processing to produce chitin and the manufacture of chitosan. Primary data for chitin and chitosan production were obtained from the actual producers, whereas raw material acquisition as well as waste management activities were based on literature sources. The effects of indirect land use change (iLUC), i.e. potential deforestation associated to the demand for land, were also included. Impact assessment was carried out by means of the recommended methods in the International Life Cycle Data (ILCD) handbook, which includes 15 indicators such as greenhouse-gas emissions, water use and land occupation.
In the Indian supply chain, the production of chemicals (HCl and NaOH) appears as an important hotspot. The use of shrimp shells as raw material affects the market for animal feed, resulting in a beneficial effect in many indicators, especially in water use. The use of protein waste as fertilizer is also an important source of greenhouse-gas and ammonia emissions. In the European supply chain, energy use is the key driver for environmental impacts, namely heat production based on coal in China, and electricity production in China and Europe. The use of crab shells as raw material avoids the composting process they would be otherwise subject to, leading to a saving in composting emissions, especially ammonia. In the Indian supply chain, the effect of iLUC is relevant, whereas in the European one it is negligible.
Even though we assessed two products from the same family, the results show that they have very different environmental profiles, reflecting their substantially different supply chains in terms of raw material (shrimp shells vs. crab shells), production locations (locally produced vs. a global supply chain involving three continents), as well as the different applications (general-purpose chitosan vs. chitosan for the medical sector).
Acknowledgement: This work was supported by European Union project “NanoBioEngineering of BioInspired BioPolymers” which has received funding from the European Union‘s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 613931.
Slides available here:EUCHIS LCA chitosan 2017 Sevilla.
