Abstract
(English)
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The concerted action aims:
· To build a European network for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) within the food chain.
· To report the state of the art of the present LCA methodology for the entire food chain.
· To develop a Strategic LCA Research Programme focused on the food chain.
· To initiate the formation of a paneuropeic data base for LCA within the food chain.
These objectives were achieved by organising several meetings, providing a web site and publishing the 'LCAnet Food Newsletter'. The final report is completed by three thematic reports on methodology, databases and environmental information.
EU research agenda: the role of EU funding is to strengthen the basic knowledge in pace with industry and society needs, the following points being of special interest:
· Methodological gaps: comprehensive approach for land use, Fundamental modelling and impact determination of pesticides, pesticides residues and heavy metals.
· Data availability: further development of the LCANET Food demonstration database, development of expert systems for validation and selection of data.
· Network buildings: Integrate the food specific data and modelling effort in wider LCA effort
· Industry and society cooperation: Include LCA in environmental labelling and in Environmental Performance Declarations for the food business sector.
In the frame of this action, EPFL-IATE has provided innovative research contributions, concentrating on the methodological research, especially on the environmental impacts of pesticides, heavy metals and on the environmental optimisation of fertiliser level. Method to include the interaction between nutrient cycle and production quality in LCA have been improved, in relation to the definition of functional units (Charles et al., 1998). The fate of nutrients, heavy metals, pesticides applied during agricultural production has been analysed and modelised. Jolliet et al., (1998) and Margni et al., (2000) adapted the critical Surface-time methodology to pesticides assessment and determined full fate and exposure for 100 pesticides, showing high impact variation of up to 8 orders of magnitude between different pesticides. However research is highly needed to improve method reliability in different fields. More studies are especially required to assess residue (inventory) and toxicity (impact) in food and water including toxic metabolites. Further researches are presently carried out at EPFL, concentrating on pesticides in plant products.
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