Suchergebnisse

A compliant tool (CalcPEFDairy) to determine the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) of Dairy products has been developed following the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) v.6.3 guidance and the 2018 approved PEFCR for Dairy products. CalcPEFDairy is a new tool that simplifies and reduces the work for LCA practitioners when implementing the PEFCR for Dairy products. On contrary to traditional LCA software, CalcPEFDairy includes all the emission models needed to calculate farm and crop cultivation direct emissions and it also implements the specific calculation formulas stated in the PEFCR such as the Circular Footprint and Data Quality Requirement formulas. Moreover, the PEF compliant datasets provided by the Life Cycle Data Network are incorporated in the tool as source of secondary data. To demonstrate the accuracy of the tool a traditional dairy farm in Catalonia (Northwest of Spain) was assessed and the results compared with the European representative PEF compliant datasets for the production of raw milk, cheese and yoghurt. In addition to the environmental profile, CalcPEFDairy has determined the case study's environmental single score (ESS) for the production of raw milk (1.0 × 10−4) cheese (9.7 × 10−6) and yoghurt (1.4 × 10−5); these ESS results are within the range of the ESS obtained from the analysed EF-datasets. The data sets' average ESS for raw milk is 9.9 × 10−5 ± 1.1 × 10−5, while for cheese and yoghurt are 1.5 × 10−5 ± 3.1 × 10−6 and 1.9 × 10−5 ± 3.4 × 10−6 respectively. A 78% of the raw milk production ESS is attributed to the dairy farm activities while, the raw milk production stage affects in a 87.4% and 80.1% to the ESS for cheese and yoghurt respectively. ; The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 712949 (TECNIOspring PLUS) and from the Agency for Business Competitiveness of the Government of Catalonia. Also, this work was ...

The capability of Anaerobic Digestion (AD) in minimising waste and retaining the value of materials and energy within the biological and technical cycles in the Dairy Industry (DI) makes AD a critical instrument of transition to circular economy. The aim of this paper is to propose an approach for measuring the environmental performance of the anaerobic treatment of dairy processing effluents based on the circular economy principles. The potential of AD to close the water, energy and nutrient circular loops is investigated together with the relevant environmental costs and benefits at different levels of the dairy supply chain. The developed methodology was based on Material Flow Analysis (MFA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) applied at three different system levels: the AD plant, the dairy processing facility, the entire dairy supply chain. The approach is demonstrated in a dairy facility coupled with a full-scale AD unit. The results show that the excess electricity (426 MWh/annum) and heat (1236 MWh/annum) produced from the AD plant cause significant reduction of the overall environmental impact of the processing facility. The recovered energy from AD provides 20% of the energy requirements of the factory reducing the total carbon footprint emissions by 13% compared to the baseline scenario. ; The authors would like to acknowledge the Royal Society for the funding of the current research: Ad-Bio, Advanced Fellowship-2015/R2. Joan Colon has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 712949 (TECNIOspring PLUS) and from the Agency for Business Competitiveness of the Government of Catalonia. Daniel Egas wants to thank the University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia for the award of the PhD fellowship No 016_MOB18 and for the award of an Erasmus Traineeship PhD with an EU Erasmus Grant (2017-18).