Simona Bosco

Life Cycle Assessment in the Fruit Sector

Fruit products are generally considered to be some of the less environmentally damaging foods in occidental diets. In fact studies investigating the carbon footprint of different food choices have reported that fruit is the category with the least environmental impact. However, these studies use data from environmental assessments of generic fruit production, which take no account of specific issues within orchard systems and fruit supply chains. Indeed, modern food production is very diverse, with high levels of specialisation and complexity. These features inevitably affect methodologies in the application of LCA to food products and agro-systems. It is therefore important to study what has already been done regarding standardisation of application protocols in order to make appropriate comparisons between products. In the present chapter, a review of LCA application in fruit systems is presented: papers from international journals, national journals, and conference proceedings have been reviewed. In particular, it can be assumed that mainstream research on the LCA applied to fruit production systems began around 2005; most of the papers were published in 2010 and 2012 in conjunction with international conferences on LCA in the agri-food sector. The review covers all the main criteria for conducting an LCA in fruit production systems. Specific issues considered are: aims and scopes, system boundaries, product considered, functional unit, data origin, life cycle-based methodology adopted, and environmental impact assessment method used. Furthermore this chapter investigates two aspects that are rarely considered in LCA studies of fruit systems: the role of nurseries in determine environmental impacts and the carbon storage properties of orchards.

Life Cycle Assessment in the Wine Sector

Currently, stakeholders’ increasing attention to quality is driving the wine sector to rethink and change its own production processes. Amongst product quality dimensions, the environment is gaining ever-growing attention at various levels of policy-making and business. Given its soundness, the use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become widespread in many application contexts. Apart from applications for communication purposes, LCA has also been used in the wine sector to highlight environmental hot spots in supply chains, to compare farming practices and to detect improvement options, inter alia. Case studies whose focus is the wine industry abound in high quality publications.