Bruno Notarnicola

Evaluating options in LCA: The emergence of conflicting paradigms for impact assessment and evaluation

LCA aims to help direct decisions in an environmentally sustainable direction. It indicates the environmental effects of choices and evaluates these against this background. Approaches to evaluation in LCA differ substantially, related to the way of modelling environmental effects and to the way these effects are combined into an overall judgement on alternative options. Several approaches are now operational, which are linked to different paradigms in decision making. It is shown that the choice of paradigm is quite decisive on the outcome of the analysis. Also within similar paradigms, different methods now operational may lead to different outcomes. These latter differences may be alleviated more easily than those related to paradigmatic choices, as they are partly a matter of refinement, and they partly result from legitimate differences in subjective priorities. The more basic paradigmatic differences can hardly be bridged. The practical relevancy of the subject is proven by applying different operational methods to one case, showing widely differing outcomes. The paradigm behind evaluating environmental effects is either values based, directly or through policy decisions, or economics based, as individual preferences measured in the monetary terms of willingness-to-pay. Accordingly, the different methods are “policy-oriented” or “monetary”. It may be doubted if the differences between these can be overcome in standardisation.

Life Cycle Assessment in the Olive Oil Sector

The olive oil industry is a significant productive sector in the European Union and the related production process is characterised by a variety of different practices and techniques for the agricultural production of olives and for their processing into olive oil. Depending on these different procedures, olive oil production is associated with several adverse effects on the environment, both in the agricultural and in the olive oil production phase. As a consequence, tools such as LCA are becoming increasingly important for this type of industry. Following an overview of the characteristics of the olive oil supply chain and its main environmental problems, the authors of this chapter provide a description of the international state of the art of LCA implementation in this specific sector, as well as briefly describing other life cycle thinking methodologies and tools (such as simplified LCA, footprint labels and Environmental Product Declarations). Then, the methodological problems connected with the application of LCA in the olive oil production sector are analysed in depth, starting from a critical comparative analysis of the applicative LCA case studies in the olive oil production supply chain. Finally, guidelines for the application of LCA in the olive oil production sector are proposed.

Life Cycle Assessment in the agri-food sector: an overview of its key aspects, international initiatives, certification, labelling schemesand methodological issues

Sustainable development and, above all, sustainable production and consumption in the agri-food sector have been key issues since the 2000s, stimulating the creation of many international initiatives and strategies aimed at reducing environmental impacts deriving from food production and consumption and at finding more sustainable ways of production. This first chapter is designed to provide the reader with an as exhaustive as possible overview of the key concerns, applications, and methodological issues of agri-food life cycle assessment (LCA). On this scale the major international initiatives (with a special focus on two relevant and recent European ones), eco-labels and declarations, and footprints (at product level, based on an LCA approach) developed so far are reported. Some of the most important LCA initiatives developed by agricultural and livestock operators, the industry sector, logistics sector, trade, and the end of life of packaging and/or food waste operators are also described in the chapter. Considering that one of the key issues within the agri-food sector is the lack of reliable and up-to-date inventory data on food products and processes, the state of the art of the major existing international LCI databases is reported, and the national and international initiatives currently under development highlighted. Finally, the chapter takes into account dietary issues in the sense that in the context of food sustainability the importance of consumer behaviour and, in particular, dietary behaviour is becoming increasingly recognised, together with the product and its production chain.

Combining Life Cycle Assessment of food products with economic tools

Abstract: The economic counterpart of LCA, known as Environmental Life Cycle Costing (LCC), is of increasing concern for LCA practitioners. Just like LCA, LCC may concern food products. Yet, the literature provides few applications of LCC to food products and, more generally, to nondurable products; moreover, the methodologies adopted vary significantly within the available studies. Other examples of combined environmental–economic tools for the assessment of food products include applications of Input–output Analysis along with Material Flows Analysis (MFA) and LCA. These combinations aim at studying the way materials and substances flow through the economy and applications in these fields are well-established ones. The main results achieved by such diverse combinations of tools are discussed here, especially those which are of managerial relevance. An effort will also be made to highlight the peculiarities that may be taken into account in future applications, when carrying out economic analysis concerning food products combined with environmental analysis.

An Input–Output Technological Model of Life Cycle Costing: Computational Aspects and Implementation Issues in a Generalised Supply Chain Perspective

Material and cost flows play an important role within manufacturing systems in setting the structural interdependences among a supply chain of production processes. Environmentally-extended input–output analysis provides a computational structure that takes these interdependences into account. This is interesting for many applications within supply chain analysis and business processes analysis, especially as far as cost accounting is concerned. This chapter addresses the emerging issue of incorporating costs into life cycle assessment as a premise to outline a concept of life cycle costing based on an input–output technological model. This model is common to both physical accounting and cost accounting. It allows product costing and resource planning to be carried out while taking into account issues concerning inter-organisational cost management, multi-product systems, closed-loop recycling, pollution abatement processes, and the production and disposal of waste. Such a framework can also be employed in order to evaluate what effect different design solutions are likely to have on both the material flows, and even the associated whole-of-life costs.

Potential Developments of Industrial Symbiosis in the Taranto Productive District

Industrial Symbiosis represents one of the approaches of the Industrial Ecology paradigm implemented as a means of making industrial production more sustainable. Currently in Italy there are only a few initiatives entailing Industrial Symbiosis and they have not yet developed fully. This chapter represents a study of the industrial sector of the Taranto province located in south east Italy, whose aim is that of identifying current and some new potential Industrial Symbiosis interactions among the firms of the sector. The economic, environmental, waste and energy analysis of the provincial industrial sector, has depicted the current state of Industrial Symbiosis and has also identified who the key players of a future Industrial Symbiosis scenario in the province could be. The waste reutilization and energy management schemes identified and described in this chapter, regarding the yearly generation of 3.25 Mt of solid waste and by products and over 1,000 ktoe of waste heat, could be used as a starting point for a real implementation of Industrial Symbiosis interactions that will effectively be able to make the Taranto province industrial system more competitive and environmentally sustainable.

GHG accounts in Italy: alternative frameworks on the basis of producer or consumer responsibility

In a previous work we have analysed the relationship between trade flows and Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) emissions for Italy and the results revealed large embodiments of GHGs in imports. These results indicate that a different accounting scheme and responsibility principle should be considered. Therefore, this paper looks at what would be the amount of GHG for which Italy would be responsible under two different GHG accounting frameworks, which are based on the responsibility of either the producer or the consumer. Through an Input-Output (IO) model, the Pollution Terms of Trade (PTTs) for Italy towards different geo-economic areas and the GHG trade balance have been estimated for a time series covering the past decade (1991?2002), in order to determine what scenarios Italy would experience if its contribution to global warming would be based on the principle of the responsibility of the consumer or of the producer.

Environmental input-output analysis and hybrid approaches to improve the set up of the pasta life cycle inventory

Input-Output analysis has been recently proposed as a method to account for environmental burdens associated with a product life cycle (IO-LCA). This top-down technique refers to economic IO tables by taking the entire economy as system boundaries, without needing the use of cut-off criteria as necessarily done in the LCA studies. Although the completeness of the results obtained with IO-LCA, the use of monetary flows leads to several limitations due especially to the degree of aggregation of statistical data. Because of these shortcomings, in this paper the LCA and the IO-LCA will be applied to the same case study - pasta life cycle - in order to verify if the adoption of both could improve the quality of the inventory set up. The LCA has been conducted by following the ISO 14040 rules, while the IO-LCA by following two different methodologies: the Environmental Input Output Life Cycle Assessment, EIOLCA, and the Missing Inventory Estimation Tool, MIET, as stated by the relative softwares available on the web. Moreover, some hybrid methods partially contemplated by the literature have been applied. The paper shows that the I-O approach could permit to overcome some limitations, which are typical of the LCA, but, at the same time, could lead to other problems. The adoption of the hybrid methods could help to overcome the limitations of both the approaches (physical and monetary) but, before applying them, a good knowledge of their pro and cons is required in order to choose the typologies of material flows which have to be modelled by one or by the other approach.