STRAWBERRY PRODUCTION CHAIN: APPLICATION OF A LCA MODEL

Food chains, strawberries in particular, often have negative environmental impacts. Worldwide is raising the concern about global food security and damage to the ecosystems. In this way growers and distributors aim to improve the environ-mental sustainability of their produce through eco-friendly means of production without reducing the quality and profitability. An important tool in improving the environmental performance of food production systems is life cycle assessment (LCA). To exploit this crop and improving its quality is important to take an overall view of the entire production process in order to understand the critic points of the system at the stage of field work and distribution to be able to improve and take action in the production process’ steps. The preparation of a budget, which is able to analyze the effects of primary and secondary production, consumption and disposal of property, is becoming increasingly important to assess the sustainability of production process. The objective of this work is the application of the LCA model to study the production chain of fresh strawberries for productive distribution areas of most interest in Piedmont. The production of 1 kg of strawberries emits 0.63 kg of CO2 equivalent, and most of the impact of the supply chain comes from plastic materials.