The purpose of the ACYVIA project is to create a database enabling further improvement of food-industry LCA’s. The project furnishes the basis for individual industrial enterprises to design foods characterised by lower environmental impacts (eco-design). The database refers to France, and also serves to representatively determine the emissions of various foods on the national level (environmental product declaration).
What has left the field or the barn still requires a great deal of water, energy, ingredients and packaging material before it is ready to be sold as meat, edible oil or dairy products. The variety and quantity of the foods we eat daily is great. Accordingly, large quantities of waste water, exhaust heat, waste materials and by-products are also associated with the food industry. An LCA can turn out differently depending on how food production is organised. In order to calculate an LCA, however, a database containing material flows for the many manufacturing processes involved in creating the different food products is needed. The project ACYVIA (Analyse de Cycle de Vie dans les Industries Agro-alimentaires) creates such a database for France. Agroscope's task consists in particular in dealing with methodological questions in the LCA, above all to ensure data quality and the modelling of specific food-manufacturing processes.
An LCA basis is created for the processing of the following product groups:
- Beef
- Pork
- Dairy products
- Edible oils
- Wines
- Canned food
- Alcohol
