Environmental impacts modeling of Iranian peach production

Abstract

The environmental hazard is a major concern in Iran. On the other hand, agriculture plays a key role in environmental impacts in this country, because this sector is both a producer and consumer of energy as well as it can increase or reduce the environmental impacts. Therefore, in this research the cradle to gate environmental impacts associated with Iranian peach production through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model is studied. According to the ISO 14040 standard, an LCA was carried out in four main steps included goal definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. In order to have better comparison, we also applied normalization and weighting indices. The results highlighted that the characterization indices of global warming, acidification, terrestrial eutrophication, depletion of fossil, phosphate and potash resources for one tonne of peach production were 172.16kg CO2eq, 2.55kg SO2eq, 5.68kg NOxeq, 1058.51MJ, 1.72kgP2O5, 0.85kgK2O, respectively. Farm gate to gate phase of production accounted for 61%, 83% and 97% of the global warming, acidification and eutrophication impact categories, respectively. So this shows that the agricultural sector of Iranian peach production (on-orchard emissions) has the greatest negative effect on the environment. The depletion of phosphate resources and followed by terrestrial eutrophication had the greatest negative effects on the environment among in different impact categories. To better environmental management of Iranian peach production, it is recommended to encourage the farmers to choose fertilizer with low environmental impact like bio-fertilizer or chemical fertilizer with lower environmental burdens respect to urea fertilizer.