Life cycle assessment as a tool to integrate environmental indicators in food products: A chocolate lca case study

Environmental indicators help to understand impacts and pollution issues. In the food production field, there is a need for an indicator (index) that provides the right information to the decision-maker regarding improvements and that is useful for making comparisons among companies. Among the research methodologies for establishing thresholds and assigning scores, the life-cycle assessment (LCA) approach was selected. The LCA was applied to chocolate production in an Italian medium-sized enterprise in the Piedmont region. Results have been used as a starting point to identify the critical environmental aspects of the 'gate-to-gate' life-cycle system, evaluating them like scores to compare other local chocolate production. The LCA case study shows that the most significant environmental aspects are energy consumption, depletion of non-renewable resources, and climate change. Some of the primary unavailable data for the life-cycle inventory phase and the need to adopt the same initial hypotheses to carry out comparative studies are the main limitations of the LCA application.