From Vineyard to Sea. Application of Life Cycle Assessment to Wine and Seafood Sectors

The path towards sustainability in the wine and seafood sectors requires the modification of the current operational and consumption patterns, involving the whole supply chain —where consumers play a relevant role. In this sense, lowering the consumption of energy and materials is necessary to meet sustainability goals and reduce environmental impacts. Hence, the environmental management tools have shown to be useful for measuring environmental performance of human activities. Among the wide range of these tools, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) highlights due to its holistic point of view of the environmental evaluation of a given product, process, or service. In this thesis, LCA was applied to wine and seafood (fishing and processing) systems in Galicia. Despite the fact that wine production was already evaluated through LCA in other production areas and countries, this dissertation delved into wine production in Galicia —which had not been assessed so far— offering a detailed inventory for the two largest Protected Designation Origin —PDO— (i.e. “Rías Baixas” and “Ribeiro”). Moreover, other tools and methodologies were implemented for wine sector. In this regard, Data envelopment analysis (DEA) —which allows analysing multiple data in order to include operational benchmarking and eco‐efficiency verification— and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions derived from Land Use Changes (LUCs) and vineyard operations were used for assessing the environmental performance of wine sector. Furthermore, fishing and seafood processing supply chain were evaluated throughout LCA and other complementary tools such as Carbon Footprint (CF) —which involves the emissions of GHGs of a product supply chain— and the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) adapted to food sector, which implies accounting the edible protein energy return on investment (ep‐EROI). Additionally, seaweed derived products —alginate— were evaluated due to its link with fishing and seafood processing. The application of LCA to wine sector permitted to identify the main hot spots for viticulture and winemaking stages, as well as the proposal of a series of improvement actions to reduce the environmental burdens linked to grape and wine production. Additionally, apart from conventional viticulture techniques, an “environmental friendly” technique such as biodynamic was assessed, characterized by a significant reduction of the main operational inputs and the environmental burdens. [Escriba aquí] The novelty of the LCA wine studies presented in this thesis was the timeline perspective, suggesting that environmental performance should be reported yearly due to the harvest yield variation, and the application of the LUCs methodology along with LCA to assess a whole PDO in terms of the GHG emissions, as well as the application of LCA to biodynamic viticulture. The combined application of LCA+DEA methodologies has been useful to avoid problems with standard deviations, which commonly arise in LCA with average inventories. The use of this approach for grape production allowed identifying the operational inefficiencies among vinegrowers and translating them into environmental efficiency as well as economic gains. Furthermore, the energy efficiency of Galician fishing fleet was assessed through the indicator ep‐EROI. For this particular case study, Galician fishing fleet inventory data, available from previous studies conducted in Galicia, were used in order to report the energy efficiency for fishing sector. LCA has also proved to be a useful indicator to report the environmental performance of seafood supply chain. Thus, the sardine supply chain through its derived seafood products was evaluated, identifying the main hot spots of them. Additionally, the GHGs emissions of a multi‐ingredient fish based product were analyzed —frozen fish sticks. For this product, fishing stage has shown to be the most relevant in terms of CF; and when consumption phase is added, final CF presented a high variability depending on consumers behavioral patterns. Finally, LCA was applied to sodium alginate extraction from seaweed. In this study, the wild harvesting and extraction process were assessed, identifying the extraction process as the main responsible for environmental burdens

Integrating urban metabolism, material flow analysis and life cycle assessment in the environmental evaluation of Santiago de Compostela

Achieving urban sustainability has become imperative. The combination of Material Flow Analysis (MFA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) could be considered an attractive method to assess the sustainability of a city’s metabolism. However, the need for exhaustive data makes this method time-consuming and uncertain. This study carries out a simplified UM-MFA-LCA analysis of the city of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) based on 7 primary flows. This approach allows: i) to determine the environmental profile of a city never before studied and ii) to determine whether a simplified analysis provides environmental impacts results similar to those of more complete studies – i.e. those in which other flows such as manufactures and building materials were also considered in the inventory data. The findings of this analysis report that the flows considered, combined with the MFA-LCA methodology, provide a ‘sufficiently accurate’ environmental impacts account when no further data is available. Furthermore, the results are highly disaggregated and a comprehensive environmental strategy plan for a city can be developed. The LCA results of Santiago de Compostela indicate that most of city’s impact happens outside its limits. Direct emissions are also identified and a number of improvement measures are proposed for both cases.publishe

Plan de negocio para el desarrollo y operaci?n de un proyecto inmobiliario para renta residencial en el distrito de San Isidro

La presente investigaci?n busca establecer la viabilidad comercial, operativa y financiera de un proyecto inmobiliario de renta residencial como alternativa de inversi?n inmobiliaria en el distrito de San Isidro. La gesti?n de los arrendamientos se realizar? mediante una empresa operadora, quien se encargar? de la captaci?n de clientes y de la operaci?n del negocio, asegurando el flujo de ingresos; luego de un plazo aproximado de 8 a?os, el fondo de inversi?n inmobiliario (?nico due?o del activo) realizar? la venta del negocio y flujos provenientes de los arrendamientos, siendo el comprador un inversionista institucional. Durante la investigaci?n de mercado, se determin? que dicho proyecto cuenta con una aceptaci?n del 32.43% dentro del mercado objetivo seleccionado; adem?s, se concluy? que las principales estrategias deben estar enfocadas en la b?squeda de operadores de renta residencial con experiencia en el extranjero que vean atractivo operar en el Per?; el lanzamiento del proyecto sea en el menor tiempo posible y apalancar las campa?as promocionales a trav?s de beneficios para los primeros arrendatarios. Finalmente, como resultado del estudio y an?lisis de este proyecto de inversi?n inmobiliaria, se obtuvo un VAN positivo y una TIR Financiera atractiva, por lo que se recomienda invertir en el proyecto

Addressing challenges and opportunities of the European seafood sector under a circular economy framework

The European seafood and aquaculture sectors are facing important challenges in terms of environmental threats (climate change, marine debris, resources depletion), social development (worker rights, consumer's awareness) or economic growth (market and nonmarket goods and services, global competitiveness). These issues are forcing all stakeholders, from policy-makers to citizens and industries, to move to more sustainable policies, practices and processes. Consequently, an improvement in collaborations among different parties and beyond borders is required to create more efficient networks along the supply chain of seafood and aquaculture sectors. To achieve this, a "nexus thinking" approach (i.e. the analysis of actions in connected systems) combined with a life cycle thinking appears as an excellent opportunity to facilitate the transition to a circular economy.This work was supported by the EAPA_576/2018 NEPTUNUS project. The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of Interreg Atlantic Area. A.C. Dias and P. Quinteiro acknowledge FCT/MCTES for the contracts CEECIND/02174/2017 and CEECIND/00143/2017, respectively, and for the financial support to CESAM (UID/AMB/50017/2019), through national funds. The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for supporting the contract of A. Marques in the framework of the IF2014 program (IF/00253/2014)

Quantifying environmental impacts associated to sodium alginate extraction from seaweed

International audienceSeaweeds have been harvested along coast line for different purposes. Potential uses of harvested seaweeds depend on the type, being used either as food for human consumption, feed for aquaculture sector, or fertilizers due to their nutrients content. Kelps —which grow along the West coast of the United States— present a high ratio of sodium alginate within their cell walls, a compound widely used by pharmaceutical and food industries because of its features: viscosity, gel and film formation capacity (FMC Corporation, 2015). This fact explains the increasing interest of extracting alginate from this seaweed at industrial level. During the last five years, several projects aiming at establishing an industry around th

Climate change mitigation opportunities based on carbon footprint estimates of dietary patterns in Peru

<div><p>Food consumption accounts for an important proportion of the world GHG emissions per capita. Previous studies have delved into the nature of dietary patterns, showing that GHG reductions can be achieved in diets if certain foods are consumed rather than other, more GHG intensive products. For instance, vegetarian and low-meat diets have proved to be less carbon intensive than diets that are based on ruminant meat. These environmental patterns, increasingly analyzed in developed nations, are yet to be assessed in countries liked Peru where food purchase represents a relatively high percentage of the average household expenditure, ranging from 38% to 51% of the same. Therefore, food consumption can be identified as a potential way to reduce GHG emissions in Peru. However, the Peruvian government lacks a specific strategy to mitigate emissions in this sector, despite the recent ratification of the Paris Accord. In view of this, the main objective of this study is to analyze the environmental impacts of a set of 47 Peruvian food diet profiles, including geographical and socioeconomic scenarios. In order to do this, Life Cycle Assessment was used as the methodological framework to obtain the overall impacts of the components in the dietary patterns observed and primary data linked to the composition of diets were collected from the Peruvian National Institute for Statistics (INEI). Life cycle inventories for the different products that are part of the Peruvian diet were obtained from a set of previous scientific articles and reports regarding food production. Results were computed using the IPCC 2013 assessment method to estimate GHG emissions. Despite variations in GHG emissions from a geographical perspective, no significant differences were observed between cities located in the three Peruvian natural regions (i.e., coast, Andes and Amazon basin). In contrast, there appears to be a strong, positive correlation between GHG emissions and social expenditure or academic status. When compared to GHG emissions computed in the literature for developed nations, where the average caloric intake is substantially higher, diet-related emissions in Peru were in the low range. Our results could be used as a baseline for policy support to align nutritional and health policies in Peru with the need to reduce the environmental impacts linked to food production.</p></div

Food waste percentages per food commodity group in different stages of the supply chain in Latin America.

<p>Adapted from Gustavsson et al. (2011).</p

Food waste percentages per food commodity group in different stages of the supply chain in Latin America.

<p>Adapted from Gustavsson et al. (2011).</p

Schematic representation of the model created to estimate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions linked to dietary patterns in Peru.

<p>Grey boxes represent raw data processing, green boxes partial results and the orange box represents the final GHG emissions per scenario.</p

Individual Global Warming Potential (GWP) values (kg CO₂eq/kg of produce or bone free meat) for the different food products considered.

<p>Individual Global Warming Potential (GWP) values (kg CO₂eq/kg of produce or bone free meat) for the different food products considered.</p