Lifecycle Assessments of some common food products

Yesterday I wrote about the lifecycle assessment methodology created by The Center for Sustainability and Excellence, which is based on international standards and is used in the assessment of various products and services on behalf of companies who would like to verify and possibly "ecolabel" products as green or even carbon neutral.

Today, I am going to list several common food products and evaluate the general results of their lifecycles. For the most part, these include some of the most important industrial and agricultural food products in the world. As you will see, their highest impacts occur at many of their stages including raw material extraction, transportation, manufacturing, distribution, use and disposal; in other words, impacts occur across the lifecycle from "cradle to cradle." (This term was adapted from the "cradle to grave" to account for the more recently included use and disposal stages, creating a full-cycle loop and thus allowing for the incorporation of the concept of the closed-loop-systems-based thinking.)


1. Bread

Bread is one of the most important industrial foods products, and producing it is obviously a huge part operations of bakeries like Butternut, Bimbo, Wonderbread, Chicago's own Prairie City Bakery, among others(assuming part or all of the bread making isn't sourced out).

According to the Journal of Food Engineering, organic production of wheat combined with industrial milling and a large bread factory is the most environmentally efficient way to make bread. Primary production(not sure whether this includes crop production or bread production) and transportation were the 2 most impactful stages. Baking consumed a high amount of energy and cultivation accounted for a lot of eutrophication in the form of nitrogen leakage from fields, emission of nitrogenous compounds in the production of fertilizers, and use of tractors.

2. Beer

America's second favorite carbohydrate! I was pleased to see this included in the Journal study. Bottle production seemed to be very high impact, which is why Goose Island's Green Line Pale Ale is only served from barrels. Other stages which accounted for high emissions were packaging and beer production, filtration, fermentation, storage, and harvesting and transport of cereals. The Journal cited various sources which used conflicting system boundaries, so if anybody has a better study on the LCA of beer, please share!!

3. Dairy

Milk production, like most food production methods, is inevitably going to lead to a conversation about conventional vs organic. Conventional uses less land, while organic uses less pesticides. If you have to use conventional methods, some suggestions are using regionally or domestic produced feeds and less use of pesticides in imported concentrated feeds. For organic, the suggestion was to use more concentrated feed, and the cultivation of higher-yielding crops. Another overall suggestion was the scheduling of products to reduce milk waste from frequent product changes. The agricultural phases are the most significant. Also of importance are waste management, packaging, and cleaning processes. The main impacts of dairy production are high water usage, high amounts organic waste, and energy use.


3. Meat production:

Beef, as you might know, has the highest environmental impacts, whether it's measured per energy unit produced or per pound. Chicken is the most efficient, unless it's measured in terms of energy produced. In this case, pork is more efficient. The main reason for beef being inefficient is the greater feed conversion ratio(mass of feed consumed divided by gain of body mass). As with milk, most of the impacts environmentally are found in the agricultural production in the lifecyle of meat products. Interestingly, organic farming was found to increase global warming impacts as well as land requirements, with the exception of sheep production. Some suggestions for a better LCA would be shorter feeding lengths, replacement of soya meal feed by pea and rapeseed-cakes for pork production, and the introduction of green legumes in intensive crop rotations with high proportion of cereals and nitrogen fertilizer. If you're doing a strictly 'greenhouse gas emissions' lifecyle analysis, it should be emphasized that major sources from meat production are from gut emissions(CH4) from livestock and N20 emissions from feed(crops) production.


If you would like to have an LCA performed on any of your products or operations at your company, please contact the Centre for Sustainability and Excellence, kikos@cse-net.org or visit http://www.cse-net.org/Contents.aspx?CatId=47.


Note: All information for this article was sourced from the Journal of Food Engineering, Volume 90, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 1-10.

Ecolabeling best practices

When ecolabeling a product, what kind of requirements are there to ensure that the label provider has done its due diligence in determining the "greenness" of a product?

With more and more accusations of greenwashing, a product development professional or marketer has to be certain that the company he/she is working with has gone through the necessary 3rd party verification processes to ensure that their label is recognized as legitimate.

Ironically, many companies may simply be too "green" to be fully aware of the current available standards that exist to help validate ecolabels.

ISO Standards 14020 and 14024 are the current international standards for environmental labeling programs. Companies like Global Ecolabelling Network can be used as a third-party to review the standards developed. The main requirements of the ISO standards are that the product is evaluated using lifecycle analysis and each standard is given a chance to be critiqued by stakeholder input in the form of public forums online or in person.

The Center for Sustainability and Excellence is a company that has served many companies' products and operations to assess the lifecycle of both products and operations. They have developed specialized in-house lifecycle assessment procedures that has been developed with the guidance of internationally recognized methodologies, such as the Clean Development Mechanism, ISO 14040 & 14042, Environmental
Protection Agency’s LCA Inventory Guidelines and Principles, and the prominent WRI GHG Protocol.

For more information on the services CSE can provide for you or the company you represent, please contact kikos@cse-net.org or visit cse-net.org.

Intel releases its 2010 CSR report

Intel published its tenth CSR report, and it's impressive. Also, they were just listed as one of the top three leaders in procurement of renewable energy according to the 'Corporate Renewable Energy Index'.

I wanted to share some of the key takeaways from the environmental portion of the report, maybe it can provide some ideas for others working on their own company reports:

• Linking employee compensation to environmental performance--although it's still only a small part of their overall employee bonus calculation, rewarding employees monetarily for in areas such as carbon management and energy efficiency is a breakthrough idea



• Sustainability in Action Grant programs--employees have applied and received grant money from Intel and accomplished projects such as rainwater collection for water cooling towers in India, boiler emissions capture for consumption of algae to for use as biofuel, and a coral reef documentation system that uses Intel technology



• Waste reduction--Intel claims they recycle at least 80% of solid waste. One interesting thing they did was give 25 tons of unused silicon wafers to a solar panel company for integration into their manufacturing processes.



• Large scale renovation---clearly we see the impact of a large corporation--Intel was able to recycle 2,225 tons of material as part of a renovation of 1 million sq ft of office space.



• Improving product energy efficiency---they estimate that the new energy efficient Intel Core technology has saved 26 terrawatt hours of electricity compared to the outdated technology between 2006 and 2009. One particular area that will be important in the years to come as data centers become larger is server processor technology. Finally, another issue of key significance is the elimination of lead from products. Intel claims to be working with governments, NGOs, and industry to "balance environmental protection with working technical solutions".



• Applying technology to environmental challenges---this is a great way for Intel to prove its worth in the environmental, and they cite many projects, from a home energy management system, to wireless energy sensing technology, to technologies that can detect pollution or naturally occuring toxins that may be caused by climate change.

For more information on how your company can begin to implement realistic, strategic sustainable solutions, please visit the Centre for Sustainability and Excellence website at http://www.cse-net.org/.