Abstract
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been increasingly used for the improvement of the environmental performance of products and services, including food systems. Amongst them, however, honey appears to have been rarely analysed. Furthermore, the pollination by honeybees can be regarded as one of the functions of an apiculture system and is of utmost importance both for natural ecosystems and agriculture. When implementing an LCA of an apiculture system, the pollination service can and should be considered as one of the functions of a multifunctional system and the issue of how to deal with this multifunctionality in the modelling of that system should be considered carefully. The aim of this paper is to explore the economic value of pollination as a potential basis for managing multifunctionality in LCA modelling as well as its implementation in a case study. Economic allocation was performed between the pollination service and honey production. The results demonstrated that the production phase is the most impactful one for most of the environmental categories (due to the use of glass for the honey jars and electricity consumption during the storage of supers in refrigerator rooms), followed by the distribution phase. Finally, the most affected environmental impact category appeared to be natural land transformation, followed by marine ecotoxicity, freshwater eutrophication and human toxicity.
Highlights
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become an increasingly popular methodology for the assessment of the environmental impacts of food supply-chains and the improvement of their environmental performance
The classification, characterisation and normalisation phases of the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) were carried out. When it came to the allocation coefficients, these referred to 59.26% of the environmental impacts that were allocated to honey and 40.74% to the pollination service
This showed a decrease in the environmental impact of the product for all environmental impact categories when economic allocation was taken into account due to the fact that a part of the impact was accounted for the by pollination service: e.g., 5.94% decrease for climate change, 16% for marine eutrophication, 12.34% for human toxicity, 8.84% for freshwater eutrophication, etc
Summary
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become an increasingly popular methodology for the assessment of the environmental impacts of food supply-chains and the improvement of their environmental performance. Besides delivering physical products—typically: Honey, beeswax, propolis, etc., which are considered to have a great range of benefits for human health (Rao Pasupuleti et al 2017)—beekeeping provides an additional function that is undoubtedly of utmost importance for both the natural ecosystems and agriculture: Pollination. This is a service provided to ecosystems. The various ecosystems—both human-managed and natural-terrestrial—depend on animal (especially insect) pollination (FAO 2018a); certainly, it is this service that is of utmost significance for a wide variety of foods, mainly horticultural crops.
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