Abstract
PurposeGlobal food production needs to increase to provide enough food for over 9 billion people living by 2050. Traditional animal production is among the leading causes for climate change and occupation of land. Edible insects might be a sustainable protein supply to humans, but environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) studies on them are scarce. This study performs an LCA of a small-scale production system of yellow mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) in Central Europe that are supplied with organic feedstuff.MethodsA combined ReCiPe midpoint (H) and CED method is used to estimate the potential environmental impacts from cradle-to-gate. Impact categories include global warming potential (GWP), non-renewable energy use (NREU), agricultural land occupation (ALOP), terrestrial acidification potential (TAP) and freshwater eutrophication potential (FEP). The robustness of the results is tested via sensitivity analyses and Monte Carlo simulations.Results and discussionImpacts related to the production of 1 kg of edible mealworm protein amount to 20.4 kg CO2-eq (GWP), 213.66 MJ-eq (NREU), 22.38 m2 (ALOP), 159.52 g SO2-eq (TAP) and 12.41 g P-eq (FEP). Upstream feed production and on-farm energy demand related to the heating of the facilities are identified as environmental hot-spots: Depending on the impact category, feed supply contributes up to 90% and on-farm heating accounts for up to 65% of overall impacts. The organic mealworm production system is contrasted with a selected Austrian organic broiler production system, to which it compares favourably (18–72% lower impacts per category), with the exception of freshwater eutrophication (6% higher impacts).ConclusionsThis case study shows that the Austrian mealworm production system compares favourably to traditional livestock systems. Compared to LCAs from large-scale T. molitor rearing facilities in France and in the Netherlands, however, the Austrian production system cannot compete for the reasons of production scale, feed conversion efficiency and type of production system. Nevertheless, the investigated mealworms represent a sustainable protein alternative that should be added to the Western diet.
Highlights
Environmental impacts from food production are unavoidable
With a 14–18% share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, livestock production substantially contributes to climate change (Gerber and FAO 2013; Herrero et al 2016)
The impacts of the mealworm production were fully allocated to the mealworms, as it has been done in comparable life cycle assessment (LCA) studies (Oonincx and de Boer 2012; Thévenot et al 2018)
Summary
Environmental impacts from food production are unavoidable. Providing human-edible proteins via animal production makes up a major impact within the food and Communicated by Thomas Jan Nemecek. Grazing ruminants increase global food supply when converting pasture into edible proteins, 77% of agricultural land is attributed to livestock production – especially due to feed crop cultivation – while farmed animals only supply one third of global protein intake with meat and dairy products (Herrero et al 2013; FAO 2017). The production of edible insects promises to have low impacts on the environment, yet only a handful of life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have documented this (Oonincx and de Boer 2012; Miglietta et al 2015; Smetana et al 2016; Halloran et al 2017; Thévenot et al 2018). 14040 and 14044 standards (ISO 2006a, b) and coherent life cycle design (Guinée 2002; Notarnicola et al 2015)
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