NEW TOOL FOR ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT CALCULATION OF THE MEDITERRANEAN AQUACULTURE PRODUCTS

Introduction

Aquaculture is playing, and will continue to play, a significant role in boosting global fish production and in meeting rising demand for fishery products. A recent session of the FAO Committee on Fisheries stressed the increasingly key role of aquaculture in fish production for human nutrition and poverty alleviation in many rural areas. The huge growth expected for aquaculture products makes necessary a more sustainable aquaculture development to mitigate the environmental impacts linked to this growth. Aquaculture can contribute to the objective of filling the gap between EU consumption and production of seafood in a way that is environmentally, socially and economically sustainable (COM (2013)229). Indeed, when practicing responsibly, fish farming can help provide livelihoods and feed a global population that will reach nine billion by 2050.

In 2013 European Commission proposes the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and Organization Environmental Footprint (OEF) methods as a common way of measuring environmental performance (COM2013/179/EU). To validate the methodology, a series of pilots for different products are developing, and Marine Fish was selected as one of the 11 food products. The package establishes the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology to measure environmental performance of European products and organizations.

Within this framework the LIFE+ AQUAPEF project was launched in 2018. The aim of the project is to provide the first software tool specifically designed for Mediterranean aquaculture sector that enables the calculation in an easy way of a harmonized environmental impact, complying PEF methodology.

Methodology

Based on the method described in Marine Fish PEF category rules, where main steps for a common use of LCA in marine fish are established, a webtool to facilitate the calculation of environmental footprint of Mediterranean aquaculture products has been developed.

The webtool gather the information of the main steps of the Mediterranean offshore aquaculture sector: feed production, hatchery, growing, preparation and distribution. Moreover, it also considers consumption and end-of-life based on average data.

AQUAPEF tool provides a common framework in which users from different stages of the supply chain introduce a series of production data. To facilitate the data gathering, the tool offers the possibility to send the questionnaires to the main suppliers of the chain. This data is confidential, and it will be visible to the user just if the suppliers give the authorization for that.

The collected inventory data is then transformed into the 16 environmental impact categories recommended by the International reference Life Cycle Data system (Fazio et al., 2018) based on the PEF-compliant public datasets. As far as the aim of the tool is to provide a system for the SME’s, it has been designed as user friendly and very intuitive. The effectiveness and usefulness of the tool has been validated with the companies of the AQUAPEF project.

Results and discussion

The webtool has been developed during 2020. Three main section has been distinguished:

• User profile: The first section of the tool comprises the creation of company-profile where the company interested in the assessment of the environmental footprint should include the information required for the evaluation of the environmental footprint, such as location of facilities or product/species produced.
• Questionnaire: Afterwards a second section is enabled, where an easy-to-understand questionnaire is presented for each type of stakeholder. As such, feed producers should include data regarding plant and animal-based ingredients (quantities and origin), energy and water consumption and packaging requirements. Hatcheries should include inventory data regarding feed, energy and water consumption, while Growing Farms should introduce data related to feed, energy, packaging and net maintenance material consumption, together with waste and biowaste management data. Finally processing facilities should include data regarding the energy, water and packaging requirements, together with the waste and wastewater quantities.

A model based on Bringolin et al., 2014 has been implemented in the tool in order to account for the N, P and C emissions of the fish metabolism and faeces.

• Results: In the result section, users could obtain the full Environmental Footprint of their products. A specific table with hot-spot assessment is also including. Finally, they will be able to compare their results with average values for their sector.

The tool has been validated in 3 case studies by comparing the outcome of the AQUAPEF tool with the calculations performed with SimaPro 9.1 commercial software. Results confirms that the tool calculates the EF correctly. Additionally, based on a qualitative questionnaire, potential improvements to increase the user-friendliness of the tool have been identified. For instance, automatic data gathering from ERP and benchmark possibilities will be added to ensure the usability.

Conclusion

The AQUAPEF webtool is currently in beta-testing stage and is expected to be commercialized by 2023. We have validated that this tool could promote the calculation of the environmental footprint linked to the aquaculture products. Moreover, the obtained results could be also used to improve the environmental performance of the aquaculture products. Main barriers for a large-scale implementation are, on the one hand, the amount and the quality of data required to feed the tool and, on the other hand, the lack of certification schemes which guaranteed that obtained results reflects the real consumption and waste ratios.

Acknowledge

This project is co-funded by LIFE European Environment Programme (LIFE17 ENV/ES/000193), which is the EU’s financial instrument supporting environmental, nature conservation and climate action projects throughout the EU.

References

Brigolin, D., Meccia, V. L., Venier, C., Tomassetti, P., Porrello, S., & Pastres, R. (2014). Modelling biogeochemical fluxes across a Mediterranean fish cage farm. Aquaculture Environment Interactions, 5(1), 71-88.

Fazio, S., Castellani, V., Sala, S., Schau, EM., Secchi, M. and Zampori, L. (2018) Supporting information to the characterisation factors of recommended EF Life Cycle Impact Assessment methods, EUR 28888 EN, European Commission, Ispra, 2018, ISBN 978-92-79-76742-5, doi:10.2760/671368, JRC109369.