Evaluation of the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission related to Italian food consumption with an hybrid LCA-IO method

In the recent years the evaluation of environmental sustainability of lifestyles and consumption practices is getting a central role in European researches. Several analytical tools and methodologies are proposed in order to quantify the environmental burden of production and consumption. Environmental impact assessment methods are mainly divided in bottom-up (e.g. the Life Cycle Assessment - LCA) and top-down (e.g. the Input-Output Analysis - IOA), the first is focused on production processes and the second on the macroeconomic dimension of a community. Thus both of them are unsuitable to investigate at the level of practices and lifestyles. We discuss the advantage of an hybrid IOA-LCA method, which is developed to consider both positive aspects of bottom-up and top-down methodologies, in the evaluation of household consumption. This method has been applied just to the food sector as a test of the whole methodology.