Life Cycle Assessment and Environmental Sustainability in the Food System

Abstract

In a globalized market where the national and international competition is growing it is important, for the Food System, to be able to focus on innovative strategies concerning the adoption of “sustainable” practices to represent an element of distinction and added value. Sustainability, in its widest meaning of well-being sustainability, can be analyzed considering four visions: environmental, economic, social and generational. In this paper, starting from a literature review, we will proceed to a theoretical analysis of the impact of the food system on the environment and of actions that, over time, have attempted to reduce it. In a second phase we will focus on the olive oil sector, which although, to date, does not include environmental externalities regarded as most critical, it is good to start to reconsider it in a new perspective. This will ensure that olive oil production can gain the competitive advantage of sustainability either to win the global competition for fielding competitive strategies, or contribute to territorial well-being sustainability. It will be used as a theoretical reference model Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) which will set a complete picture of the interactions with the environment of the olive oil sector. The LCA considers externalities of each phase of olive oil production towards human health, ecosystem quality and resource depletion and also economic and social impacts. Finally, we will apply the LCA model to same Italian case studies in order to evaluate their environmental performance.