scholarly journals Predicting the environmental impacts of chicken systems in the United Kingdom through a life cycle assessment: Broiler production systems

2012 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Leinonen ◽  
A.G. Williams ◽  
J. Wiseman ◽  
J. Guy ◽  
I. Kyriazakis
2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (7) ◽  
pp. 4062-4077 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna L. Stephenson ◽  
Elena Kazamia ◽  
John S. Dennis ◽  
Christopher J. Howe ◽  
Stuart A. Scott ◽  
...  

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 2166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Rajabi Hamedani ◽  
Tom Kuppens ◽  
Robert Malina ◽  
Enrico Bocci ◽  
Andrea Colantoni ◽  
...  

It is unclear whether the production of biochar is economically feasible. As a consequence, firms do not often invest in biochar production plants. However, biochar production and application might be desirable from a societal perspective as it might entail net environmental benefits. Hence, the aim of this work has been to assess and monetize the environmental impacts of biochar production systems so that the environmental aspects can be integrated with the economic and social ones later on to quantify the total return for society. Therefore, a life cycle analysis (LCA) has been performed for two potential biochar production systems in Belgium based on two different feedstocks: (i) willow and (ii) pig manure. First, the environmental impacts of the two biochar production systems are assessed from a life cycle perspective, assuming one ton of biochar as the functional unit. Therefore, LCA using SimaPro software has been performed both on the midpoint and endpoint level. Biochar production from willow achieves better results compared to biochar from pig manure for all environmental impact categories considered. In a second step, monetary valuation has been applied to the LCA results in order to weigh environmental benefits against environmental costs using the Ecotax, Ecovalue, and Stepwise approach. Consequently, sensitivity analysis investigates the impact of variation in NPK savings and byproducts of the biochar production process on monetized life cycle assessment results. As a result, it is suggested that biochar production from willow is preferred to biochar production from pig manure from an environmental point of view. In future research, those monetized environmental impacts will be integrated within existing techno-economic models that calculate the financial viability from an investor’s point of view, so that the total return for society can be quantified and the preferred biochar production system from a societal point of view can be identified.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 4475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hendrik Marx ◽  
Silvia Forin ◽  
Matthias Finkbeiner

Companies are increasingly interested in reducing their environmental footprint. Thereby, they face the challenge of identifying and mitigating their specific impacts and hotspots and simultaneously avoid burden shifting. The organizational life cycle assessment (OLCA) method was conceived and successfully tested for the assessment if companies’ potential environmental impacts. Still, the method poses methodological challenges for the application to service providing organizations. In this paper, OLCA was applied to a service providing SME in the photovoltaic and wind energy business in the United Kingdom. The environmental impact profile of the reporting organization is dominated by transport activities, including the technicians’ trips to the solar farms, employee commuting, and business travels. According to the main goals of the study (gaining insights in internal operations and improving organizational procedures), recommendations to reduce travel-related impacts are provided. For existing methodological challenges like selecting the reporting flow and setting the system boundaries, innovative solutions like defining multiple reporting flows for different activities and to partly include service receiving objects in system boundaries are discussed with the aim to facilitate future applications.


2018 ◽  
Vol 197 ◽  
pp. 195-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morteza Taki ◽  
Farshad Soheili-Fard ◽  
Abbas Rohani ◽  
Guangnan Chen ◽  
Hasan Yildizhan

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Nardina Trícia Rigo Monteiro ◽  
Jean-Yves Dourmad ◽  
Paulo Cesar Pozza

ABSTRACT: Environmental impacts of livestock systems, especially pig production, have come under increasing debate in recent years. The challenge is in meeting the growing demand for food at an affordable cost, without compromising environmental integrity. Previous studies have shown that feed production is responsible for the majority of CO2-eq. emission resulting from pig farming systems. This seems to indicate that feed strategies could be an effective tool to achieve the sustainability of the pork chain. Therefore, dietary crude protein reduction, through the addition of industrial amino acids, lessens the nitrogen excretion by pigs and, consequently, could mitigate the effects on the environment of pig production. In this sense, to effectively evaluate the environmental impacts of pig production systems, life cycle assessment has been widely used in agriculture, but the effects of feed are still understudied in Brazilian conditions. Owing to the importance and the great concern in this research area, we presented in this paper an updated review focusing on the nutritional techniques and their potential to reduce the global warming potential of pig production, considering both the direct effects, related to the choice of feed ingredients and the indirect effects, related to changes in the efficiency of use of nutrient by the animals.


Author(s):  
Heinz Stichnothe ◽  
Cécile Bessou

Growing demand for palm oil is driven by increasing human population, income growth as well as biodiesel stimulation programs. Covering an area of over ten million ha in Indonesia, palm oil production is also one of the most important sources of crop residues while processing generates large amounts of wastewater. Cultivation and processing of this crop are considered as potentially large sources of emissions. Improving environmental impacts of the palm oil production can help to reduce existing emissions while increasing yield and generating surplus energy and farm income. However, area expansion for oil palm plantation is perceived as  closely linked to illegal logging, deforestation and diminishing biodiversity. Apart from ensuring sustainable land use change, the use of residues is the most important criterion in ensuring sustainable palm oil. It is important to note that there are trade-offs (e.g. between maximizing bio energy production, reducing environmental impacts other than greenhouse gases (GHG), and sustaining soil fertility). Nitrogen (N) losses in palm oil production systems are a major environmental and economic issue. Unfortunately,  there is little comprehensive knowledge on how to calculate N-budgets in oil palm plantation in order to optimize fertilization, taking into account N-leaching and N-gaseous emissions. Land use, soil-carbon, N-emissions and biodiversity are key aspects of life cycle assessment (LCA) of palm oil production systems and they pose a number of methodological questions.


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