The food industry uses numerous commodities which originate from different regions and are produced in very different manners. Given that a specific quantification of the environmental impacts associated with commodity production is scarcely feasible, the MEXALCA method was developed to enable estimates for worldwide production in the crop-production sector.
The MEXALCA (Modular Extrapolation of Agricultural Life Cycle Assessment) method calculates the environmental impacts of the worldwide cultivation of a plant product based on the FAOSTAT database with the help of models.
Starting from a base inventory, the environmental impacts for each individual country of production are estimated and extrapolated to the global level, bearing in mind production in the individual countries. This allows us to roughly estimate the distribution of the global environmental impacts.
