Life cycle assessment of technologies for partial dealcoholisation of wines

Abstract Wine is one of the most popular alcoholic drinks in the world. This beverage, in moderation, is considered to be heart healthy, particularly the red variety. However, civil concerns and some health reasons have greatly increased the consumer demand for dealcoholised wines. Several techniques for producing low- and reduced-strength alcoholic beverages have been developed over the last several years. The most common treatments are spinning cone column (SCC) and membrane technologies such as reverse osmosis (RO) or ultrafiltration (UF). An innovative technology, called evaporative pertraction (EP) has shown promising results for the partial dealcoholisation of wine. This technology has some drawbacks and some benefits such as low energy demand. Therefore, a life cycle perspective is required to evaluate technology along with its environmental impacts. This work assesses and compares the environmental performance of EP, SCC and RO fusing a life cycle assessment methodology based on the use of two variables: natural resources sustainability (NRS) and environmental burdens sustainability (EBS). For the technologies, RO presented a higher energy consumption and lower materials and water demands than did EP, whereas the latter displayed better results in all of the air categories except for human health effects (HHE) and in three of the five water categories. The highest consumption of natural resources (NR) and the greatest environmental burdens (EB) in all of the categories were given by the SCC technology. Nevertheless, this situation was reversed when the wastewater from the SCC process, with its high ethanol content, was energy valorised.