Deliverable 6.3: Environmental sustainability report (LCA)

Summary

This deliverable corresponds to work conducted in Task 6.3 on Environmental assessment. Environmental assessment is conducted following a life cycle perspective, specifically using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools recommended by the European Commission and the United Nations Environmental Programme in the frame of the Environment Footprint and Life Cycle Initiatives. This tool was selected due to its holistic vision, including both the whole production chain concept and multi criteria environmental indicators, as well as its quantitative, scientific approach to estimating environmental impacts. However, being aware of the limitations of LCA tools in its ability to assess the comprehensive sustainability of organic production systems, the current deliverable must be seen as part of a wider sustainability assessment, complemented by the additional assessments conducted in WP6 (e.g. Response Inducing Sustainability Evaluation (RISE) tool). In addition, it is the ambition of the Organic-PLUS project to contribute to improving the LCA methodology to make it more suitable for organic production systems.
Therefore, facing the reality of highly variable practices within agricultural production systems, and that information about alternative inputs will increase over time; it is our ambition with this publication to provide a dynamic and easily adaptable deliverable. This means providing a transparent methodological guideline of the assessments conducted with reference scenarios, and the provision of calculation forms Excel files, which may be easily updated. We aim for a tool which will be useful beyond project completion and may facilitate stakeholder interaction.
LCA has been applied in accordance with ISO standards 14040 and 14044 (2006a and b) and consequent amendments (2020 a, b, c). The methodological guideline established in the frame of EF initiative (EU-JRC, 2018) has been followed. Section 2 provides a detailed description of the methodology and models applied.
According to the geographical distribution of the Organic-PLUS project partners and based on data availability, four different baseline scenarios were selected for organic production of aubergine, tomato, citrus and olive, as well as three scenarios for organic livestock production, sheep, pig and poultry. These scenarios were used as case studies to test the environmental performance of contentious inputs (e.g. copper, synthetic vitamins, peat) compared to their potential alternatives (e.g. potassium bicarbonate, thyme oil, composted organic matter). Section 3 explains the calculation forms created with the idea to have a dynamic deliverable tool, which allows changes in inputs, characterisation factors and the addition of new datasets. The practitioner can change the values in the LCI sheet for both the current scenario and alternative scenario.
Section 4 provides a preliminary assessment of the suggested alternatives to replace or reduce the use of contentious inputs, whose information is being constantly improved and provided through experimentation. It is foreseen that this preliminary assessment will act as a feedback and aims to contribute to address environmental improvement of potential alternatives. A new alternative may not only mean a substitution of contentious inputs but could also include a change in practices. Therefore, because of the holistic perspective of LCA tools, consequences of implementing alternatives to contentious inputs in crop or livestock management may be accounted for.
Results from the assessment of baseline scenarios show that application of copper and mineral oil leads to emissions which may be of major importance for freshwater ecotoxicity. For other impact categories, other inputs may become relevant. According to experimental trials conducted by ‘WP3 PLANT’ partners and feasibility data, we tested the substitution of copper and mineral oil with following products: Potassium hydrogen carbonate, low-copper fertilisers and thyme essential oil extracted from Thymus vulgaris. Results have shown that the alternative inputs cause very minor environmental impact. However, this shall be considered as a preliminary result since we have seen that for copper-based plant protection products, the toxicity effect depends on the type of metal speciation, which in turn depends on physic-chemical characteristic of the surrounding environment (soil and water), and in that regard specific studies are being conducted to include this behaviour in LCA (e.g. Peña et al 2017).
The current LCA method does not include the characterisation of antibiotic impacts due to the lack of information regarding their effects on environmental factors assessed in LCA, therefore consequences on health and productivity remains unaddressed in LCA. In any case, the phasing out of these contentious inputs in organic agriculture seems to imply changes in livestock management rather than replacement with alternative products. The calculation forms created can be used to compare practices and add new models, which will result in a useful tool when more information is provided.
Besides the traditional use of manure fertilisers coming from organic production systems, Organic-PLUS aims to study alternative products used as alternative fertilisers. From an environmental and circular economic perspective, we would consider the use of by-products or residues from other processes as potential alternative fertilisers, hence we discuss the different methodological approaches to this and highlight the importance of the potential treatments (e.g. composting, pelletising and anaerobic digestion) used to valorise these by-products into fertilisers, with a special emphasis on how emissions should be accounted for (section 4.3 and 4.4).
The comparisons between peat-based growing media (seen as contentious) and compost made from locally derived materials (forest residues, horse manure), and fossil fuel-based mulching plastic foil vs. degradable plastic foil made from potato starch, showed that although the normalised and weighted value for the alternatives was lower than for the contentious inputs, there was no clear winner when looking at all the impact categories separately (section 4.5). Through a contribution analysis of the alternative compost growing media, the hotspots in its life cycle were found to be diesel consumption, transport of forest residues and emissions, all within or going to the compost plant. For the case of bio-plastic (section 4.6), an important parameter that can influence results was the thickness of the bio-plastic, thus, if the thickness was reduced, it would reduce the quantity of material manufactured (e.g., potato starch), and subsequently, the impacts could be reduced.
The main critical aspects found within the life cycle inventory (LCI) of organic crop and livestock products include the lack of manufacturing datasets for inputs used in organic production systems such as several common plant protection products (PPPs) and alternative animal welfare products (e.g., antimicrobial essential oils) (Section 5.1). There are no available manufacturing datasets for biological control agents (BCAs), plant-derived essential oils (thymol, carvacrol, neem), mineral oil, pyrethrin, Spinosad and copper oxychloride. To advance in this aspect, new manufacturing LCI datasets for prevalent PPPs used in OA in Europe were developed in the frame of Organic-PLUS project (Spinosad, Bacillus subtilis, Chitosan and neem oil, specific LCIs can be found in Montemayor et al. (a, in preparation).
Moreover, through the assessment conducted, other contentious inputs or hotspots aspects than the ones focused on in the Organic-PLUS project emerged. Section 5.2 provides a list of these, which are largely related to energy consumption, transport and water consumption, the latter mainly in Mediterranean regions.
Toxicity and biodiversity impact categories have shown to be of special interest for organic production systems, and therefore relevant for Organic-PLUS. We have devoted special sections for each (section 5.3 and 5.4). In particular, biodiversity was found to be one of the most important and distinguishing aspects between organic and conventional systems in LCA. Hence, this aspect has been addressed in Organic-PLUS.
After a review of existing approaches to deal with biodiversity loss in LCA studies, we have selected the work conducted by Knudsen et al. (2017). These authors developed characterisation factors (CFs) to include biodiversity impacts for organic and conventional agricultural production, based on standardised sampling of plant species richness in organic and conventional farms across six countries in Europe within the temperate broadleaf and mixed forest biome. However, in the context of Organic- PLUS and for agriculture in Europe, one limitation of this model is that it does not have CFs for the Mediterranean biome, one of the most agriculturally productive areas in Europe. Therefore, we have developed CFs for the Mediterranean biome using the methods described in Knudsen et al. (2017) and secondary plant richness data from organic grape, olive and arable crop farms in Spain, Italy, France and Greece (Montemayor et al., b, in preparation).
An important output of the activities conducted to produce this deliverable (Task 6.3) was the detection of potential shortcomings as well as a provision of some solutions. LCA tools will continue to be developed and improved in the scientific community thus, we have also identified and prioritised potential aspects for further research beyond Organic-PLUS (Section 6). The LCA method was strictly used where it was appropriate for organic production, thus not forcing one sustainability analysis tool, like LCA, as a singular answer to all issues of organic (and conventional) production.
In conclusion, through the environmental assessments conducted in Task 6.3 we can conclude that:
1) From a holistic environmental perspective, it can be stated that there are further environmental hotspot aspects, which may have major importance other than those being focussed in the Organic-PLUS project. We would highlight fossil fuel-based energy consumption such as diesel for labour operations, electricity consumption and transport. Additionally, water consumption, in particular, for dry Mediterranean regions could be an input with negative environmental implications, and hence should be seen as a contentious input. These issues are relevant for organic and conventional agriculture.
2) When alternatives to contentious inputs developed and studied in the Organic-PLUS project were considered, e.g. composted organic matter for peat in growing media, degradable plastic from potato starch for covering of soil, these products presented an improvement for some environmental aspects, but showed a worse behaviour for others. From the revealed “hotspots”, it can be derived where efforts can be put if the goal is to develop alternatives which score better in LCA.
3) LCA methodology may be useful to assess environmental effects of agricultural production, but requires more development to better grasp the particularities of organic production systems. Hence, additional sustainability assessment tools (e.g., RISE) will be applied to account for other aspects of organic agriculture at the farm-level.
4) The present publication includes adaptable calculation forms (implemented in a spreadsheet programme e.g. Microsoft Excel), which can allow for updating and creation of new scenarios.
5) Several proposals to improve datasets for organic production have been presented.
6) We have contributed to the development of characterisation factors for biodiversity indicators in agricultural production following the work initiated by Knudsen et al (2017).
7) Proposals for further research to improve the environmental assessment of organic production systems were made, emphasising that the current dominating impact categories are not well suited to discriminate between various farming practices.