Life Cycle Assessment in the Agri-Food Sector

The current emphasis on sustainable development warrants the development and adoption of innovations to render industrial production more efficient in the use of natural resources and less polluting. In order to develop innovations for sustainability, management models and evaluation tools must integrate objective environmental considerations. One such tool is the Ambitec-Agro System, a set of integrated indicators specifically proposed to assess environmental impacts of agro-industrial innovations. This System compares an innovation’s environmental performance against the preexisting technology, focusing the analysis on the innovation-adopting establishment scale. This study presents a conceptual method that expands the scope of Ambitec-Agro by including life cycle thinking and watershed vulnerability analysis to the environmental performance evaluation of agro-industrial innovations. In order to develop this approach, the steps inherent to a multi-criteria decision support system were followed. The proposed method includes four life cycle phases to evaluate the environmental performance of an agro-industrial innovation: (i) raw material production used by innovation, (ii) innovation production, (iii) innovation use and (iv) its final disposal. The method also includes a vulnerability analysis of the watersheds where each life cycle phase takes place. The proposed integrated method provides decision makers a broadened view of an agro-industrial innovation environmental performance, shedding light on technological improvements throughout its entire life cycle.