Concealed nitrogen footprint in protein-free foods: an empirical example using oil palm products

Abstract

The agro-food system satisfying human food demand releases heavy nitrogen (N) loads into the environment. The N footprint is an indicator of N loads from individual consumption of food as well as energy. A bottom-up approach called the ‘N-calculator method’ calculates the food N footprint using the N content in consumed foods, such that the N footprint of protein-free foods is treated as zero. This method underestimates the N footprint of protein-free foods, such as oil and sugar, when the source crops require N input in production. In this study, we propose a substitution factor, the virtual nitrogen factor for protein-free foods (VNFree), defined as the potential N load per unit weight of consumed food, to explicitly calculate the production N footprint. Oil palm and its products, palm oil (PO) and palm kernel oil (PKO), were chosen for this case study of protein-free foods. Global mean VNFree values of PO and PKO obtained by averaging national-scale data of the three countries with the largest production (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand) were 0.0241 and 0.0037 kg N kg–1 oil, respectively. The 6.5-times difference in VNFree values was attributed to the difference in oil yield. The food N footprint of PO and PKO calculated here represented less than 2% of the previously reported total food N footprints of several countries. However, oil palm products are also used for industry, and the chemical fertilizer consumption for oil palm accounted for only 8%–12% of that of all oil and sugar crops. The protein-free N footprint of all these products will be much larger. We expect that the current N-calculator method as a bottom-up approach will be improved by expanding the VNFree concept, which enables the calculation of the concealed N footprint in protein-free products, including all uses of oil and sugar crops.