Resumen de Instituto de ciencia y tecnología ambientales
During the last decade, the agricultural sector has changed from traditional practices to more intensive methods in order to increase their productivity, as a response to the growing demand of an increasing population. Consequently food production has become an important contribution to the depletion of natural resources and climate change.
To develop a proper environmental management it is essential for industries to know the main environmental indicators of their products and production processes: emissions, energy and water consumption, waste generation, efficiency, etc. It also can help producers to improve their production system management, give an added environmental value to their product, and provide more information to consumers.
Considering that apple and peach are two significant fruits in the Mediterranean countries, and most publications on environmental impacts of fruit productions are based on one single productive year, this study attempts to perform an environmental analysis of apple and peach production using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, in order to provide new environmental information of fruit, and also introduce a multiyear perspective analysis to identify the variability of the environmental impacts related to annual orchard yield, geographic and climatic conditions. The results will be expressed in terms of Carbon footprint (CF) and Water Footprint (WF) terms, In order to compare these concepts from a methodological point of view, and how those can be introduced to inform fruit sector and the consumers. The CF measures the emissions of CO2eq related with the life cycle of a product or services in terms of Global warming. WF measures the water consumed to develop a product a good or a service in terms of litres.
This study follows an interdisciplinary framework, considering the following stages in the process of fruit production: agricultural stages, retail, consumption ad disposal, as well as the back-ground system related with materials and substances production. The systems studied are apple and peach orchards located in Catalonia. Data used have been collected directly from an orchard of the Fruit Production Program at the Institute of Agriculture and Food Research and Technology (IRTA) located in the North East of Spain, and covers between 9-15 years of real production.
This dissertation contributes to detect the hot spots of the environmental impact related to fruit production with a perspective of LCA, as well as evaluate the advantages and weakness the existing methodologies to calculate the Carbon and water Footprints, besides developing methodological aspects and generating new data on the topic and fruit producers and all the actors involved in fruit production. Although the study demonstrates that LCA is a useful tool for estimating the impact associated with a product or process and calculate the CF and WF indicators, there are still some issues to be resolved regarding to the quality of environmental impact databases and data available because sometimes, it is needed to work with generic data, and it can generate variability in the results.
