TP11A Case studies on agricultural products
C120-122
1:20 PM - 4:40 PM, Tuesday
() Application of Life Cycle Assessment as a Basis for Evaluating the Environmental Performance of Western Australian Food Supply Chains - A presentation of three cases on bread, beer, and cooking oil.
Narayanaswamy, V1, Van Berkel, R1, Altham, W. A1, McGregor, M.2, 1 Centre of Excellence in Cleaner Production, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, Australia2 Muresk Institute of Agriculture, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
ABSTRACT- In the past agriculture has relied on the application of end-of-pipe or clean-up solutions to environmental problems brought on by the management and production processes that it has adopted. This has led to outcomes and approaches that are single media and process or facility focused. The recent trends in the broader industrial sector have been towards the adoption of system's approaches to environmental concerns that have a strong business focus on sustainability, look at multiple media and adopt a lifecycle methodology. This paper will focus on the application of an eco-efficiency tool Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), to the Australian grains industry. LCA is a relatively new environmental decision support tool recently standardised by the International Standards Organisation (ISO 14040). The paper will start with establishing Eco-efficiency as a normative objective of farm and supply chain management, and then proceeds with a summary of the application of LCA to three Australian grain supply chains, wheat to bread, barley to beer and canola to cooking oil. The paper concludes that LCA has significant potential for supporting environmental management of food and farm decision-making and provides a useful basis upon which to base national/international level policy analysis.
Key words: life cycle assessment, eco-efficiency, agribusiness supply chains