Life cycle assessment in the food industry

Abstract As all industrial processes and food production significantly contributes to consumption of resources and presents remarkable environmental impacts to be evaluated through a life cycle approach. This chapter presents and discusses the implementation of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in different food industries. Specific methodological issues related to the food sector are discussed with particular attention to functional unit, system boundary, allocation rules, crop cultivation, manure management and packaging. The following main product categories are considered: products of agriculture, live animals and animal products, fish and other fishing products, beverages. LCA, originally developed to be used as decision support tool for environmental management, has now several related applications such as external communication through environmental labels and declarations. A further step in applying LCA to food industry would be the spread of environmental certification and labeling schemes utilization for Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) communication. For this reason, in this chapter several applications of environmental labels to food products are presented.