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

How to access environmental impact of pork?

To assess how a given food product as e.g. pork may affect the environment a method called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used. LCA is product-oriented to assess the resource use and environmental impact through a product's life cycle. An LCA is an assessment of the environmental effects a product or service has during its lifetime, from cradle to grave. In an LCA all the important processes during the products lifecycle is included (see Figure 7 for an illustration on pork). An LCA can for example be used for assessing how much greenhouse gas is emitted to the environment during the production of one kg pork meat.

Figure 7. The product chain of Danish pork delivered to the Port of Harwich in Great Britain