A modular LCA to evaluate product characteristics developed in the dissertation of Niels Jungbluth
Supervisors: Prof. Roland W. Scholz, Prof. Olivier Jolliet, Dr. Olaf Tietje
Niels Jungbluth: "Umweltfolgen des Nahrungsmittelkonsums: Beurteilung von Produktmerkmalen auf Grundlage einer modularen Ökobilanz" Dissertation ETH Nr. 13499, Umweltnatur- und Umweltsozialwissenschaften, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, 316 Seiten, ISBN 3-89825-045-8 , dissertation.de, Berlin (Book 40€;or free PDF download).
The thesis won the "greenhirn price 1999/2000" and is available with the same title by Öko-Institut e.V.,Werkstattreihe Nr. 123, ISBN 3-934490-07-7.
Who hasn't been standing once in front of the supermarket shelf and asked herself if the organic carrots from Italy or the cauliflower from her own country is the most ecological choice for the next meal, and then, finally, has decided to buy the delicious asparagus from the USA? The extent of environmental impacts of food consumption depends on various factors. It is not easy for consumers or even for experts to account for these impacts.
The goal of this research work was to assist consumers in considering environmental aspects. Separate LCA's were calculated to assess various aspects of the consumers' choices, e.g., the type of agricultural practice, the origin of the product, the use of packaging material, the type of preservation, and the consumption (including home transport, conservation, and preparation). A modular LCA approach was developed to model the impacts of the consumers' decisions. This simplified method allows investigating the ecological tradeoffs among different decision parameters (such as assessing a biological product from the Netherlands vs. greenhouse from Switzerland). Most of the decision parameters might have an influence on the overall impacts of a vegetable product. Greenhouse production and products transported by airplane cause the highest environmental impact. The agricultural production determines the overall environmental impacts of meat products. The total impacts for purchased vegetable or meat products might vary by a factor of nine or seven respectively. It could be shown that the environmental impacts of purchases by different consumer subgroups vary. Different hints for consumers were ranked, according to the variation of average impacts, due to a marginal change of consumption patterns.
This book is of interest for all people working on the ecological assessment of food products, those dealing with the environmental impacts of consumption patterns or the decision making situation of consumers. A hardcopy of this thesis (315 pages) is available for EUR 40.00 atdissertation.de. The thesis (PDF-format, 3.6 MB) can be downloaded free of charge. A summary of this work has been published as an article in the Int. J. LCA. (A summary of the book, pdf-format).
The life cycle inventory data and LCIA results shown in this thesis have been updated in several projects of ESU-services. Thus, I do not provide anymore the partly outdated annexe mentioned in this research work. Nevertheless, the most important conclusions drawn in this research work are still valid.
All datasets of the Ph.D. thesis are sold in the EcoSpold format and are linked to the most recent ecoinvent data. The data can be imported to several software products, e.g. SimaPro, Gabi or Umberto. We can also offer you to calculate up-to-date results for several LCIA indicators.
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