A product perspective on the environmental impacts of food
A database on the environmental impacts from basic food products was produced in 2000-2003 for the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, as part of the project "Lifecycle Assessment of Basic Food". The database is available free of charge at www.lcafood.dk.
The database is based entirely on consequential modeling according to the ISO 14040 series (i.e. the models include those processes that are influenced by a marginal change in demand, and uses system expansion to model the emissions related to co-products). Marginal producers of agricultural products have been determined by econometric modeling. The database covers basic food products, as produced and consumed in Denmark, from agriculture and fishery through industrial foodprocessing to retail and cooking.
The basic data can be used for many purposes, e.g. benchmarking, environmental labeling, and identification of improvement options. The database includes a number of examples of how food industries have used the database for life cycle assessments, to answer specific questions about their products.
As an example, we assisted the multinational bakery chain Lantmännen, when introducing a product-oriented environmental management system in the project “LCA as a tool in the learning bakery”.
On the page Product-oriented policy for agricultural production you can read more on our applications of LCA for policy support, e.g. our benchmarking study for pig and milk production comparing pig production in USA, Brazil, Spain, The Netherlands and Denmark, and comparing milk production across different European farm types.