Published by Blonk Consultants at 05/01/2016

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Comparison environmental impacts beef meat

I n April 2013 the European Commission published the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method. This method is a framework of general requirements and principles for LCA. The European Commission aims to develop more specific technical guidance for product groups (‘category rules’) and tests the development of PEFCR with several European industrial sectors. In 2014, the second wave of 11 PEF food pilots started, which involves food product groups such as red meat, dairy, beer, wine, pasta. Blonk Consultants supports the development of three pilots (feed, beer and red meat). Since it is the goal of PEFCRs is to support the communication of the environmental performance of products, data consistency and compliance with PEFCR requirements is key.

Agri-footprint and the PEF pilot initiatives

Agri-footprint® is an LCA database that is developed with the intent to support the development of agricultural and food product (agri-food) LCAs, for a wide range of applications. This is the reason that it supports multiple allocation and emission modelling methods. The PEF pilot initiatives generate new data requirements on for example allocation. These will be implemented in future updates of Agri-footprint® to support PEF-compliant calculations. A first step of alignment of Agri-footprint® to the PEF data quality requirements is integration of the calculation approach of the Cattle Model Working Group (CMWG) in Agri-footprint® 2.0, which is released in December 2015. The CMWG provided specific guidance on how to allocate between co-products on the farm and slaughterhouse level, and on how to calculate specific emissions from animal husbandry (such as ammonia and nitrous oxide emissions). To show some of the implications of the implementation of CMWG calculation rules, a case study on Dutch dairy and Irish beef are presented in a paper, where the original life cycle inventories of Agri-footprint are compared to the inventories aligned to the CMWG calculation rules.