Comparative life cycle assessment of margarine and butter consumed in the UK, Germany and France

Abstract

Purpose The goal of the study was to compare the environmental impact of butter and margarine. Altogether, seven products were studied in three European markets: UK, Germany and France. Methods The approach used for the analysis is descriptive (attributional) LCA. The SimaPro software PRé 2007 was used to perform the calculations. Data for the production chain of the margarine products (production of raw materials, processing, packaging and logistics) were compiled from Unilever manufacturing sites, suppliers and from literature. The edible oil data inventories have been compared with those in proprietary databases (ecoinvent and SIK food database) and they show a high degree of similarity. For the butter products, data on milk production and butter processing were taken from various published studies for the countries of interest. Sensitivity analyses were conducted for a number of parameters (functional unit, allocation method, impact of using different oil, milk and dairy data, impact of estimating GHG emissions from land use change for certain oils) in order to evaluate their influence on the comparison between margarine and butter. The sensitivity analyses demonstrate that the initial results and conclusions are robust. ResultsThe results show that margarine has significantly lower environmental impact (less than half) compared to butter for three impact categories global warming potential, eutrophication potential and acidification potential. For primary energy demand, the margarines have a lower impact than butter, but the difference is not as significant. Margarines use approximately half of the land required used for producing the butter products. For POCP, the impact is higher for the margarines due to the use of hexane in the oil extraction (no similar process occurs for butter). Conclusions The margarine products analysed here are more environmentally favourable than the butter products. In all three markets (UK, DE and FR) the margarine products are significantly better than the butter products for the categories global warming potential, eutrophication potential and acidification potential. These findings are also valid when comparing margarines and butters between the markets; for this reason they are likely to be of general relevance for other Western European countries where similar margarine and butter production systems are found.

Avaliação do Ciclo de Vida na bovinocultura leiteira e as oportunidades ao Brasil

“…É o somatório da energia retirada da natureza para cumprir o sistema de produto analisado (ZANGHELINI, 2013 leiras dos supermercados, a fase da produção do leite é a principal fonte de impacto ambiental em toda a cadeia dos produtos lácteos (GUIGNARD et al, 2009;NILSSON et al, 2010;VAN MIDDELAAR et al, 2011). Assim, produtos que requerem maior quantidade de sólidos do leite por quilo de produto geram necessariamente maior quantidade de emissões ao ambiente (DJEKIC et al, 2014;THRANE;HERMANSEN, 2014).…”

Water Footprint and Life Cycle Assessment as approaches to assess potential impacts of products on water consumption. Key learning points from pilot studies on tea and margarine

“…Inventory data from a recent LCA study on margarine provided data from oil mills on water abstraction (Nilsson et al, 2010). It was assumed that water used in the mills for steam production is not consumed, as it is basically used in a closed system.…”

The environmental analysis of asiago PDO cheese: a case study from farm gate-to-plant gate

“…These LCAs have differences in typology of analysed dairy product and country, system boundaries, functional unit, allocation and estimated impact categories, which lead to difficulties in making exact comparisons. Analyzed dairy products are fluid milk, such as fluid milk in the US ) and fluid milk in Italy (Fantin et al 2012), or butter, such as Italian butter (Bianconi et al 1998;Masoni et al 1998) and butter in the UK, Germany, and France (Nilsson et al 2010), or yogurt, like the Spain one (Gonz alez-Garc ıa et al 2013a). Furthermore, there are LCAs on the cheese lifecycle, some of them consider the production of cheese, such as Dutch semi-hard cheese production (van Middelaar et al 2011), Portuguese mature cheese production (Gonz alez-Garc ıa et al 2013b), Serbian cheese production (Djekic et al 2014) and Swedish cheese production (Flysj€ o et al 2014), but others consider the whole lifecycle, including consumption, such as Swedish semi-hard cheese (Berlin 2002), world-wide cheese (Guinard et al 2009), cheddar cheese and mozzarella cheese in the US (Kim et al 2013).…”

“…The application of just one allocation strategy is not sufficient for decision making, considering the influence of allocation strategy on the LCA results, thus a comparison of different allocation strategies is crucial and suggested in order to consider LCA as a decision support tool (Luo et al 2009). Economic allocation strategy (based on the revenue from each plant product) was used by Berlin (2002), Nilsson et al (2010), van Middelaar et al (2011 and Fornasari (2013). Kim et al (2013) performed a LCA study where economic allocation and milk solids allocation strategies (base on milk solids content of each plant product) were applied, while the impacts have been totally assigned to cheese without using allocation strategy in Gonz alez-Garc ıa, Hospido et al (2013).…”