Environmental life cycle assessment of production, processing, distribution and consumption of apples, sweet cherries and plums from conventional agriculture in Norway

Abstract

Abstract Production and consumption of food is an important driver of environmental damage. In this article, life cycle assessment (LCA) results for Norwegian apples, sweet cherries and plums are presented. At the time of writing this is the first published LCA study of plums. The study is comprehensive, as it includes nursery, orchard infrastructure, orchard full life cycle, product waste through the value chain, and gives result pr kg edible product. Results are presented for the impact categories climate change, eutrophication, acidification, cumulative energy demand, fossil abiotic depletion, freshwater ecotoxicity and non-cancer human toxicity. The respective cradle-to-grave global warming impacts of plums, sweet cherries and apples are found to be 0.88, 0.64 and 0.46\u202fkg CO2-eq per kg fruit consumed. For most of the impact categories, plums are found to have higher environmental impacts than sweet cherries, which in turn have higher impacts than apples, and the primary production stage generally gives the highest impact. Food loss/food waste across the value chain is found to contribute 11–13% of the global warming impact. Functional units based on intake of energy, vitamin C and dietary fibre are also investigated. These results enable a comparison of the environmental performance of different food products in light of the nutritional function of food. The use of these units does not fundamentally change the relative overall performance of the three fruit types. It is observed that the development of a weighted cumulative nutrition-based functional unit would allow a more comprehensive assessment. The article reflect fruit production not only in Norway but a large climate zone near the limits of where fruit can grow. If consumers would follow Norwegian dietary recommendations, the consumption of fruit and vegetables would be increased by 50%, which would give a huge increase in environmental impact related to fruit production and consumption. In light of this it is important to know the environmental impact related to fruits.