Product Environmental Footprint for Feed Production in Thailand

Abstract

Extended Abstract Food industry in Thailand is one of the high-volume exports. According to the statistics, in 2014, exports accounted for 27% of chicken production, which is ranked fourth in the world and ranked first in the EU (42%) [1], it presents the majority market share. This study aims to prepare and support Thailand industries to export to the EU single market by using product environmental footprint (PEF) to be a tool for evaluating the quality of products on environmental perspective. The study complied with methodology and environmental footprint impact category to conform to the PEF guide [2]. Also this study is a part of the shadow pilot project of the PEF, which led by the National Science Technology and Innovation Policy Office (STI) and National Metal and Materials Technology Center (MTEC) that collaborated with one of the large chicken industries named Betagro Public Company Limited. In a nutshell, the environmental impacts of chicken feed shall be assessed whole life cycle from cradle to grave, which covered from raw materials acquisition stage to disposal stage, by considering the functional unit was 1 kg of chicken feed products. The main ingredients of chicken feed should be provided the protein and energy to improve chicken health as with increasing in size and to produce more eggs. Maize, wheat, rice bran and soy bean meal are majorly used for chicken feed which contain high nutritive values, and therefore most widely used in animal feed industries because they contain less in fat and high in proteins. The composition of feed by each recipe based on age of chicken (breeder and broiler) and the growth stage of the chicken. The mainly environmental impact categories of chicken product has feed production (approximately value more than 50% by weight) and the significant environmental impact categories were climate change, freshwater eutrophication, freshwater ecotoxicity, water resource depletion and land use. The results found that the main contribution to environmental impacts of feed production is raw materials acquisition, especially maize from Thailand and soybean meal from Argentina. In worldwide typically use maize starch for main ingredient of poultry feed because its energy source is highly digestible for poultry. In addition, the plant protein source traditionally used for feed manufacture is soybean meal, which is the preferred source for poultry feed [4]. However, the environmental impact of broiler feed shows higher than breeder feed that because the ratio of maize in boiler feed to tonne feed is 1:0.46 whereas breeder feed 1: 0.54. Thus, this study focuses on the feedstuffs of broiler feed with percentage of protein is retained. The percentage of crude protein in feedstuffs as shown in table 1 [5,6].