Life Cycle Assessment

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
   1. Objectives
   2. Learning goals
   3. Teacher page
2. Course content: Life cycle assessment (LCA) of pork chains
   1. What are the environmental impact of food production?
   2. Global warming
   3. GWP of different foods
   4. Nutrient enrichment (eutrophication)
   5. Acidification
3. How to access environmental impact of pork?
   1. LCA of 1 kg Danish Pork
   2. What is included in a LCA?
   3. Phase 1
   4. Phase 2
   5. Phase 3
   6. Phase 4
   7. System expansion and allocation
4. LCA for different production Systems
   1. The Danish standard system
   2. The Danish organic system
   3. The French standard system
   4. The Alternative French system: Porc Basque
   5. Summary of performance and LCA in the four systems
5. Completion
   1. Comments
   2. Self-assessment
   3. Key messages
   4. Further reading and references
   5. Evaluation
   6. Acknowledgement

GWP of different foods

1

The GWP are very different for different foods. How would you imagine the ranking of different foods? Match the food product you think have highest GWP (CO2 per kg) with 1,and match the food product you think have second highest GWP with 2 etc. a) Beef Choose... 1 5 2 4 3 6 b) Bread Choose... 1 5 2 4 3 6 c) Lamb meat Choose... 1 5 2 4 3 6 d) Milk Choose... 1 5 2 4 3 6 e) Pork Choose... 1 5 2 4 3 6 f) Potatoes Choose... 1 5 2 4 3 6 Meat is far the largest contributor to carbon food print of a typical Danish diet. The larges contributor is in the following order: Beef, lamb meat, pork, milk, bread and potatoes is the food product with the lowest GWP.

Figure 3. Carbon Footprint of a typical Danish diet,
contribution from different foods {% of CO₂-eq.}

Meat is far the largest contributor to carbon food print of a typical Danish diet. This is not only due to the amount of meat consumed, but also the fact that the contribution to global warming from meat production is higher compared to other food products in terms of kg CO₂-eq./kg food. This is illustrated in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Global warming potential of foods

Pork does per kg meat not have the same high CO₂-costs as e.g. beef and lamb; however pork is still in the top of the climate pyramid involving considerable higher CO₂-costs (approx. 3.6 kg CO₂/kg meat) than e.g. bread and vegetables.

The environmental impact of different meats is highly influenced by the total amount of feed used in all the life-cycles of the animal. The following numbers give the level of feed dry matter used per kg live weight of different animal species

Table 2. Feed use per kg live weight for different animal species

¹⁾http://www.lcafood.dk/

²⁾Nguyen, T.L.T. er al. (2011)

³⁾Nguyen, T.L.T. er al. (2010a)