CAST Webinar: Use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in Food and Agriculture

CAST Webinar: Goals, Strengths and Limitations Governing the Use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in Food and Agriculture

Presenter: Dr. Marty Matlock, University of Arkansas
Panelists: Dr. Juan Tricarico, Moderator, Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, Dr. Kurt Rosentrater, Iowa State University, Dr. Yuan Yao, Yale University

This CAST Commentary is a free download available at www.cast-science.org/publications.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method to identify all the inputs & outputs necessary to make a product & quantify the associated environmental & socioeconomic impacts. In its simplest form, the LCA method describes the inputs (e.g. energy, materials, & resources) to a process & all the resulting outputs including the desired product (functional unit), other co- or by-products, & the emissions & losses to the environment. Each input is itself the product of another upstream process. So, LCA provides a modeling framework to link all processes together such that the sum of the inputs and outputs of all involved processes are included. This framework can be very complex, depending on how many upstream processes & downstream outputs relative to the functional unit are included in the assessment. LCA provides a system perspective that considers a product's life cycle & quantifies the relevant impacts caused by it.

LCA is a relatively young discipline. Conceptually it started in the 1960s & its early applications were used to study the impacts of food packaging. Now, the application of LCA findings is wide ranging from corporate decision-making on product development & marketing (e.g. environmental product declarations & eco-labelling) to policy development, evaluation, and implementation.

The agricultural & food communities need to familiarize themselves with LCA use & interpretation because of the growing emphasis on its use & interpretation because of the growing emphasis on its use to examine & quantify the impacts of agricultural production & its growing influence on private and public sector decision-making.