Blog

New LCA calculator for Danish Horticulture

June 20, 2023 by Karen-Emilie Trier Kreutzfeldt

We have developed a new LCA calculator that gives members of the Danish horticultural industry the opportunity to calculate the CO₂ equivalents and several other environmental impacts from their own production. The intended application for our client, Danish Horticulture (Dansk Gartneri), was to identify impacts and hotspots and use the outcome to substantiate their ongoing work on reducing the impacts from the Danish horticultural production. The tool is prepared for both organic and conventional cultivation practices.

The horticulture-specific calculator includes emissions for the production and upstream in the life cycle, including relevant processing and packaging. Results are given per ton crop at the green house gate. The calculator is simple to use and thus allows each horticultural producer to focus on communicating their impacts and to identify their possible improvement potentials.

To highlight this new option and the functions of the tool, I wrote an article (CO2-beregner for gartnerier) for the printed Danish industry magazine, Gartner Tidende. You can read more about this project in English on our project page.

EU agrees law to fight global deforestation – does it reduce deforestation?

December 7, 2022 by Jannick Schmidt

Yesterday, the European Parliament and the Council agreed on a law to fight global deforestation caused by EU production and consumption[1]. The initiative to reduce deforestation is the most welcome! But is the EU actually reducing deforestation with the new regulation? In short, the EU wants to fine companies who imports or produce products from crops grown on land that was subject to deforestation after 31^st December 2020. This means that products exported to the EU will have to be sourced from land that has not recently been subject to deforestation. This would imply that countries such as Brazil and Indonesia would have to make sure that their export to the EU comes from land deforested longer ago than 31 December 2020 – which is easy because more than 85% Brazil’s and 70% of Indonesia’s agricultural land would comply with this. Deforestation frontier countries such as Brazil and Indonesia just need to make sure to export from the recent deforested land to countries outside the EU, that’s the only thing needed – no need to halt deforestation. The EU basically just makes sure that deforestation can be blamed to countries outside the EU, while making no difference for the forests we want to protect.

If the EU wants to reduce deforestation, the most effective means are:
– Spend money on nature conservation.
– Impose import toll on all products from countries with high deforestation rates.
– Compensate countries for their protection of nature. Protection of nature poses an opportunity cost compared to cultivating the land. The EU cannot just ask the countries with high forest cover to bear the costs of deforestation.
– Support initiatives to increase yields – especially in countries with low yields and areas very prune to deforestation.

The current proposed regulation:
– Impose a ban on products from producers and countries, who have the option to make a big difference. A ban means that the EU is looking the other way and loses the opportunity for contributing to a green transition.
– This loss of opportunities actually means that the new regulation potentially has a higher environmental impact than business as usual.

Read more here: https://lca-net.com/p/4888

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_7444

LCSA database and method

September 28, 2022 by admin

This summer we published our new fully quantitative Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) method and database, all open access. We call it the 2021 Social Footprint method. Social as in welfare economics: ‘An accounting that encompasses the entire societal economy’, not limited to Social as one of the triple bottom lines. And 2021 to signal a significant update from the first 2018 publication.

This month, I presented the method at the 8^th International Social Life Cycle Assessment Conference in Aachen, and you can now view the presentation on our YouTube channel. Some important highlights:

• The impact categories are now based on the ‘capitals’ approach, which ensures complete coverage of impacts on all global assets: natural, manufactured, intellectual, human capabilities, and social networks, while still being quantifiable in the same unit of Quality-Adjusted person-Life-Years (QALYs).
• Data are available for 163 countries (> 99% of the World in terms of GDP, population, and impacts), bounded by the subjective wellbeing data from the annual UN Happiness reports.
• Low requirement for company-specific data.
• 78% of the global impacts are related to inequality in income, which means that results are very easy to interpret and act upon: The more even the income levels are in the product life cycle, the better the social footprint. Once you have identified the hotspots in the life cycle in this way, the database provides ample options for identifying which impacts contribute the most to social impacts in each country, so that you can target your improvements towards the most important problems (and even quantify them).