Environmental indicators help to understand impacts and pollution issues. In the food production field, there is a need for an indicator (index) that provides the right information to the decision-maker regarding improvements and that is useful for making comparisons among companies. Among the research methodologies for establishing thresholds and assigning scores, the life-cycle assessment (LCA) approach was selected. The LCA was applied to chocolate production in an Italian medium-sized enterprise in the Piedmont region. Results have been used as a starting point to identify the critical environmental aspects of the 'gate-to-gate' life-cycle system, evaluating them like scores to compare other local chocolate production. The LCA case study shows that the most significant environmental aspects are energy consumption, depletion of non-renewable resources, and climate change. Some of the primary unavailable data for the life-cycle inventory phase and the need to adopt the same initial hypotheses to carry out comparative studies are the main limitations of the LCA application.
The Rural Development Plan (RDP) represent the most important source of contributions and support for the agro-food sector companies in Italy. The European Community planning tool based on a European Structural and Investment Fund (SIE) allows the agricultural and forestry entrepreneurs to undertake projects and investments for the improvement of their companies. During the 2014-2020 RDP program, the Emilia-Romagna region (Italy), promoted a rewarding mechanism to support those companies carrying out Carbon Footprint (CF) study of their product supply chain. The Product Category Rules (PCR) considered in the analysis refers to the PCR "Preserves and Preparation of Meat", UN CPC 2117. Primary data was used for all the life cycle phases (slaughterhouse/sectioning, meat processing and distribution), except for the pig farming phase and the packaging end-of-life scenarios. Moreover, for the breeding stage modelling, processes from the Agri-footprint 2.0 database are used, adapting it to the Italian heavy pigs breeding method. The goals of this study are two: first of all to evaluate the overall impact of the Parma ham P.D.O. on-the-bone and, on the other hand, to analyze how the real accuracy of the data influenced the results. The overall impact is 23.11 kgCO2eq, with the most significant contribution due to the upstream module, in particular for the farming stage (68.4%), in line with other benchmark. Then a sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the effects on the total impact of the economic allocation data in the slaughterhouse stage.
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