Autor(es): Karin Bartl y otros
Crop and technology choices in agriculture, which largely define the impact of agricultural production on the environment, should be considered in agricultural development planning. A life cycle assessment of the dominant crops produced in a Peruvian coastal valley was realized, in order to establish regionalized life cycle inventories for Peruvian products and to provide the basis for a regional evaluation of the impacts of eutrophication, acidification, human toxicity, and biodiversity loss due to water use. Five scenarios for the year 2020 characterized by different crop combinations and irrigation systems were considered as development options. The results of the regional assessment showed that a business-as-usual scenario, extrapolating current trends of crop cultivation, would lead to an increase in nitrate leaching with eutrophying effects. On the other hand, scenarios of increased application of drip irrigation and of mandarin area expansion would lead to a decrease in nitrate leaching. In all scenarios the human toxicity potential would decrease slightly, while an increase in irrigation water use would benefit the biodiversity of a nearby groundwater-fed wetland. Comparisons with results from other studies confirmed the importance of regionalized life cycle inventories. The results can be used as decision support for local farmers and authorities.
Ir al enlaceAutor(es): Ramzy Kahhat Abedrabbo y otros
The management of electronic waste (e-waste) presents new sustainability challenges, prominent among these is informal electronic recycling in the developing world fed by both international and domestic sources. There is a need to mitigate environmental impacts of informal recycling while maintaining social and economic benefits of refurbishment and reuse. The development of appropriate social responses is hindered by critical data gaps, which include lack of data on trade flows of used and scrap electronics, flows invisible to trade statistics of many countries. We address this data gap by proposing and implementing an approach to quantify the exportation of used and scrap equipment from a particular country or region to the rest of the world. The approach is based on material flow analysis and combines collection of primary survey data from residential and business/public sectors with secondary data from available recycling, landfill and computer adoption studies. Exports are estimated through materials balance: exports = generated − reuse − recycling − landfill. The proposed methodology is implemented in a case study of desktop (excluding monitors) and laptop computers in the United States (US) in 2010. Results indicate that 40 million used and scrap computers entered the end-of-life management sector, from which 30% were reused domestically, 6–29% were exported, 17–21% were landfilled in domestic sites and 20–47% were collected for domestic recycling in 2010. The range in results reflects uncertainty arising from inferring end-of-life fate from individual and institutional users. Given sufficient resources to conduct a survey, the proposed materials flow analysis method can be widely applied to other devices and nations.
Ir al enlaceAutor(es): Karin Bartl y otros
Global water use is dominated by agriculture and has considerable influence on people’s livelihood and ecosystems, especially in semiarid and arid regions. Methods to address the impacts of water withdrawal and consumption on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems within life cycle assessment are still sparse and very generic. Regionalized characterization factors (CFs) for a groundwater-fed wetland at the arid coast of Peru are developed for groundwater and surface water withdrawal and consumption in order to address the spatial dependency of water use related impacts. Several agricultural scenarios for 2020 were developed in a workshop with local stakeholders and used for calculating total biodiversity impacts. In contrast to assumptions used in top-down approaches (e.g., Pfister et al. Environ. Sci Technol.2009, 43, 4098), irrigation with surface water leads in this specific region to benefits for the groundwater-fed wetland, due to additional groundwater recharge from surplus irrigation water. However, irrigation with groundwater leads to ecological damage to the wetland. The CFs derived from the different scenarios are similar and can thus be used as general CFs for this region, helping local decision-makers to plan future agricultural development, including irrigation technologies, crop choices, and protection of the wetland.
Ir al enlaceAutor(es): Red Peruana Ciclo de Vida y otros
Purpose: The main purpose of this article is to propose specific discard indexes for their development in fisheries life cycle assessment (LCA). The objective of these is to characterize and standardize discards in worldwide fisheries. Methods: The global discard index (GDI) is intended to be an easily understood index whose use is extendible to any fishery in the world. It is presented as a dynamic index that aims to characterize and standardize discard rates between fisheries by direct comparison with the global discard rates reported periodically by FAO. Furthermore, a simplified approach excluding characterization is presented for scenarios in which the data quality linked to discards is poor. Two additional indicators, survival rate of discards and slipping, are proposed to improve the reporting and quantification of biomass waste by fishing vessels. Results: GDI implementation, together with two other fishery-specific impact categories, showed remarkable differences in the environmental impacts of several fishing fleets when compared with the obtained results for conventional impact categories. Results for the conventional categories were strongly influenced by the energy use in the fishery, while results obtained for fishery-specific categories presented variable trends due to the dependence on a wider range of factors. GDI inclusion favored direct comparison with worldwide average discard rates on a time scale basis, from a wet weight or a net primary productivity perspective, depending on the selected approach. Conclusions: Proposed indicators achieved the important objective of integrating discard data as a fishery-specific impact in fishery LCAs, increasing the benefits of implementing LCA in fisheries assessment. Specific advantages of these indicators include assessing changes in capture and landing composition, evaluating the selectivity of the fishing gears, and monitoring the behavior of fisheries in a normalized context respect to other fisheries. GDI was identified as an adequate methodological improvement for regular use in fisheries LCA. Future developments GDI include its harmonization for inclusion in damage assessment.
Ir al enlaceAutor(es): Ian Vázquez Rowe y otros
An important percentage of European wine appellations base their production on a broad number of vine-growers that annually sell their grapes to the wineries under the specific Denomination of Origin. Hence, the use of average values for the environmental evaluation of this type of multiple datasets can create large standard deviations that may impede an adequate interpretation of the results. Combined implementation of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), known as LCA + DEA methodology, has proven to be a suitable tool for assessing multiple input/output data in several agri-food systems, such as aquaculture, farming or fisheries. In the current study, a total of 40 vine-growing exploitations belonging to the Rías Baixas appellation (NW Spain) were analyzed following LCA + DEA methodology in order to determine the level of operational efficiency of each producer. Furthermore, potential reductions in the consumption levels of the material inputs were benchmarked, while calculating the environmental gains linked to these reduction targets, thus verifying eco-efficiency criteria. Results led to average reduction levels of up to 30% per material input, which translated into environmental gains that ranged from 28% to 39% depending on the selected impact category. Additionally, a super-efficiency analysis led to identify the best performing units, which were used as a source of reference values for environmental impacts. Finally, potential economic savings of 0.14 € per functional unit (i.e., 1.1 kg of grapes for the production of a common 750 ml bottle of wine) were estimated on the basis of efficient vine-growing practices.
Ir al enlaceAutor(es): Isabel Quispe Trinidad
The goal of this project was to enhance the use of the life cycle approach within the Latin-American Region. It was focused on capacity building for developing Regional Life Cycle Inventories. The project was developed by researchers belonging to the LCA community in cooperation with UNEP, and Governmental representatives and statistic offices providing the data. More precisely, this project aimed at building home-grown expertise, including capacity for South-South cooperation, environmental leadership, and also at supporting the use of science-based approaches and evidence-based decision-making in mainstreaming environment in government policies in each of the countries participating in the project. The critical review process is still to be done, but it must be accomplished by June of 2011. The project started with the establishment of general rules for harmonization of sound and comprehensive life cycle inventory data and information. These rules were applied to the field of electricity production, transmission and distribution. This productive sector was chosen due to the fact that it is a common and necessary key input to all economic activities. Results: A quality guideline was developed for the project, based on the one used to build the national Brazilian LCI. Four different LCI were built in ecospold format, based on information collected in four different countries, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Peru, which cover the hydroelectric and thermoelectric generation processes, and the transmission and distribution systems. Lack of LCA acknowledge in the industrial and public sectors, and difficulties to find reliable public data and information, arise as the major problems in most of the participating countries, even though the electric sector is more incline than other sectors in providing the public with more and more information regarding its emissions and compliances. The capacity building process and differences between the countries in terms of structure, technology, environmental regulations, among other factors, made the use of a common and detailed quality guideline very difficult to be applied. Thus, capacity building process on LCA in emerging regions seems better to be conducted on a step-by-step basis, which must consider the development of a simpler approach to build generic prototype models that can undergo later a continuous improving process. Data consistency and harmonization appears to be two of the major issues that must be specifically addressed in a Regional quality guideline.
Ir al enlaceAutor(es): Ian Vázquez Rowe y otros
Mauritania, one of the most dependent fish trade nations in the world, has an important octopus fishery within its EEZ. Fishing treaties between the EU and this Sub-Saharan nation have permitted 24 Spanish cephalopod trawling vessels to target this species for its export as a frozen product, mainly to Spain, Italy and Japan. This article presents Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology in order to assess and compare the environmental impacts related to the capture, processing and exportation of packed frozen octopus from this fishery to the main importing nations. Environmental results show that frozen common octopus presented a remarkable dominance of the fishing vessel activities, due to the high energy intensity of the fishery and to the fact that these activities include harvesting, processing and preliminary packaging. Post-harvesting activities presented low relative contributions in all impact categories, minimizing the food mile effect of exporting to Japan, thanks to the slow transportation through marine freight of frozen octopus. The results for fishery-specific indicators showed regular trends for trawling fleets, with high discard and seafloor impact rates. Therefore, improvement actions focused on the minimization of energy use and fishery-specific impacts and the shift to less ozone layer damaging cooling agents are the main targets in order to improve the sustainability of this product, as long as the slow freighting characteristics of the imported product are maintained.
Ir al enlaceAutor(es): Ian Vázquez Rowe y otros
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the environmental impacts linked to fish extraction on a temporal basis, in order to analyze the effect that stock abundance variations may have on reporting environmental burdens. Inventory data for the North-East Atlantic Mackerel (NEAM) fishing season were collected over an 8-year period and used to carry out a life cycle assessment (LCA). The selected fishery corresponds to the Basque coastal purse seining fleet. Materials and methods :The functional unit (FU) was set as 1 t of landed round fish in a Basque port during the NEAM fishing season for each of the selected years. The selected data for the life cycle inventory were gathered from personal communication from ship owners and from a fish first sale register in the Basque Country. A series of fishery-specific impact categories and indicators were included in the evaluation together with conventional impact categories. Results and discussion: Conventional LCA impact categories showed that the environmental impact is dominated by the energy use in the fishery, despite of the low fuel effort identified with respect to other purse-seining fisheries. Nevertheless, strong differences were identified between annual environmental impacts, attributed mainly to remarkable variations in NEAM stock abundance from 1 year to another, whereas the fishing effort remained relatively stable throughout the assessed years. Fishery-specific categories, such as the discard rate or seafloor impact showed reduced impacts of this fishery respect to other small pelagic fish fisheries. Finally, the fishery in balance (FiB) index identified the evolution of NEAM stock abundance for this particular fishery. Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the first fishery LCA study in which there is sufficient inventory data in order to conduct the methodology throughout a wide period of time. The outstanding variance in environmental impacts from one season to another evidences the need to expand fishery LCAs in time, in order to attain a more integrated perspective of the environmental performance of a certain fishery or species. The extension of LCA inventories in the timeline may be an important improvement for activities that rely entirely on the extraction of organisms from wild ecosystems. For instance, future research will have to determine the importance of increasing the timeline in fishery LCAs for species that do not show large stock abundance variations through time, unlike NEAM.
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