Exploring hotspots in the carbon footprint and energy use profiles of tomatoes grown for the Sydney market

Abstract

One of the key issues with the consumption of horticultural products is the depletion of fossil resources and greenhouse gas emissions along the production and supply chain. Australia's horticultural sector contributes about 6% of the total greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Although this figure appears to be smaller as compared to other sectors within agriculture, agricultural sector as a whole may come under cIoser government scrutiny in the future to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions (Australian Government, 2010). It is estimated that the vegetable industry contributes close to 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions within horticulture (Deuter, 2008), In response to national and international initiatives on food labelling, vegetable products may be required to identify their energy and carbon footprints as a way to reduce some of the environmental impacts. This is where Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool could be applied to estimate key environmental impacts of agri-food products. The key feature of LCA is that it considers the system-wide environmental impacts and not just those occurring at the farm. LCA enables to assess the trade-offs between various environmental impacts and in this way helps to guide informed decision making at the individual and policy level. We apply LCA to study two key environmental impacts namely the global warming and the resource depletion potential from tomato production systems. We identify environmental hotspots in carbon and energy footprints by assessing the growing phase of tomato production and the key operations that influence the results. We have chosen tomato as a case study because it is an important vegetable following potato and there are different pathways (example greenhouse vs field production) in which fresh tomato reaches the Sydney consumer. The results from this research along with other environmental considerations such as impacts of freshwater scarcity will help provide guidance in the design of more sustainable vegetable production practices for the Sydney region