Suchergebnisse

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been increasingly used for the improvement of the environmental performance of products and services, including food systems. Amongst them, however, honey appears to have been rarely analysed. Furthermore, the pollination by honeybees can be regarded as one of the functions of an apiculture system and is of utmost importance both for natural ecosystems and agriculture. When implementing an LCA of an apiculture system, the pollination service can and should be considered as one of the functions of a multifunctional system and the issue of how to deal with this multifunctionality in the modelling of that system should be considered carefully. The aim of this paper is to explore the economic value of pollination as a potential basis for managing multifunctionality in LCA modelling as well as its implementation in a case study. Economic allocation was performed between the pollination service and honey production. The results demonstrated that the production phase is the most impactful one for most of the environmental categories (due to the use of glass for the honey jars and electricity consumption during the storage of supers in refrigerator rooms), followed by the distribution phase. Finally, the most affected environmental impact category appeared to be natural land transformation, followed by marine ecotoxicity, freshwater eutrophication and human toxicity.

The tourism industry is one of the fastest growing sectors, even though in the last couple of years there has been a negative effect due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This growth has led to an increase in environmental, economic and social impacts. Furthermore, the transition towards a circular economy has become one of the priorities of the European Union given its orientation towards sustainable development. However, the concept of circular tourism has been poorly analysed until now. This paper aims at identifying a set of life cycle-based sustainability-and circularity-related indicators for the hospitality sector by means of a literature review and a content analysis. It presents an overview of the most relevant themes and indicators in the tourism sector, showing that carbon footprint and resource-related indicators are especially relevant. Given the complexity of the measurement of circularity and the fact that life cycle-based indicators have started to be considered in this field, the paper also proposes some criteria for indicator selection to make their application more feasible for hospitality actors.