Systembolaget in Sweden, Alko in Finland, and Vinmonopolet in Norway have social responsibility policies that include the environmental impact related to their activities. As part of this, the monopolies seek to identify the most important of their environmental impacts and options for reducing them. This study pertains to the product turnover in year 2014 and has been published in a report: Environmental impacts of alcoholic beverages.
The primary aim of this report is to present data for the environmental profile of pork and to identify the most polluting parts in the product chain of Danish pork by use of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. The functional unit was ‘1 kg of Danish pork (carcass weight) delivered at the Port of Harwich’, and the environmental impact categories considered were global warming, eutrophication, acidification and photochemical smog. The global warming potential was 3.6 kg CO2 equivalents per functional unit, which corresponds to the emissions from a 10 km drive in a typical passenger car.
It was found, that the environmental ‘hot spots’ in the production chain of Danish pork occur in the stages before the pigs’ arrival at the slaughterhouse. The highest contributions to global warming, eutrophication and acidification arise from production of feed and handling of manure in the pig housing and under storage. However, the manure/slurry applied to the fields also made a significant contribution to eutrophication potential. The transport of the pork to the Port of Harwich was not an environmental hot spot and contributed less than 1% of the total amount of greenhouse gasses emitted during the production. This result highlights, that ‘Food miles’ are a misleading environmental indicator.
The environmental profile of pork established was based on data from 2005, and it was found, that the environmental impact (global warming, eutrophication and acidification potentials) has been reduced since 1995. These environmental improvements were mainly obtained by lower feed (and protein) consumption and improved handling of manure/slurry. A potential exist for improving the environmental profile further. In particular, the greenhouse gas emission per kg pork can be reduced, if the manure/slurry is anaerobically digested, and the biogas is used for heat and power production.
The environmental impact of Danish pork was compared with the environmental impact of British and Dutch pork. This comparison showed, that the global warming potentials were equal, whereas the eutrophication and acidification potential was highest for British pork. Dutch pork had slightly lower eutrophication and acidification potential compared to that of Danish pork.
A prospective environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) and financial cost assessment is performed to the application of bioaugmentation to sand filters in Danish waterworks, to remove 2,6-dichlorobenzamide (BAM) from drinking water resources. Based on pilot-scale and laboratory-scale data, we compare bioaugmentation to current alternative strategies, namely granular activated carbon (GAC) adsorption, and well re-location. Both assessments identified well re-location as the least preferred option, however, this result is very sensitive to the distance from the waterworks to the new well. When bioaugmentation is compared to GAC, the former has a lower impact in 13 impact categories, but if immobilized bacteria are used, the impacts are higher than for GAC in all impact categories. On the other hand, from a cost perspective bioaugmentation appears to be preferable to GAC only if immobilized bacteria are used.
Table: Summary of Costs and greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions for the four scenarios assessed for a waterworks producing 800,000 m3/year.
An increasing number of companies are expanding their environmental impact reduction targets and strategies to include their supply chains or whole product life cycles. In this paper, we demonstrate and evaluate an approach, where we used a hybrid Environmental Input-Output (EIO) database as a basis for corporate and product environmental footprint accounts, including the entire supply chain. We present three cases, where this approach was applied. Case study 1 describes the creation of total corporate carbon footprint accounts for three Danish regional healthcare organisations. In case study 2, the approach was used as basis for an Environmental Profit and Loss account for the healthcare company, Novo Nordisk A/S. Case study 3 used the approach for life cycle assessment of a tanker ship. We conclude that EIO-based analyses offer a holistic view of environmental performance, provide a foundation for decision-making within reasonable time and cost, and for companies with a large upstream environmental footprint, the analysis supports advancing their sustainability agenda to include supply chain impacts. However, there are implications when going from screening to implementing the results, including how to measure and monitor the effect of the different actions. Thus, future research should include more detailed models to support decision-making.
This conference presentation is an outcome of the project Relative Sustainability of Vegetable Oils. The talk can also be seen on a video on youtube. The related publication is Life cycle assessment of five vegetable oils.
