Life cycle assessment data of French organic agricultural products

Abstract

Environmental data on organic products are needed to assess their environmental performance. The purpose of the ACV Bio project reported here was to generate environmental data as life cycle assessment (LCA) data for a sample of French organic production systems including cropping systems (annual crops, intercrops, forages), grassland, wine grapes, cow milk, calves, beef cattle, sheep, pigs, broilers and eggs. LCA was used to estimate environmental impacts of products from these systems. Recommended uses are to characterize part of the diversity of French organic farming systems and some of their environmental impacts, identify areas for improvement, perform eco-design and sensitivity analysis, and/or make system choices in a given context. However, these data do not represent average French organic products and should not be used as such. The MEANS-InOut web application was used to generate life cycle inventories (LCI). Impact assessment was performed using SimaPro v9 software. The Environmental Footprint 2.0 characterisation method was used to generate LCA data. These data were supplemented with three LCA indicators: cumulative energy demand, land competition (CML-IA non-baseline) and biodiversity loss. Three non-LCA indicators were also calculated for certain systems: diversity of crop families (for cropping systems), agro-ecological infrastructure (for sheep) and pesticide treatment frequency index (for grapes). In total, 173 products were modelled. LCA and non-LCA data are available in the Microsoft® Excel file at Data INRAE (https://doi.org/10.15454/TTR25S). LCI data are available in the AGRIBALYSE database and can be accessed using SimaPro and openLCA software. Farmer-practice data are available on demand.

Keywords

• Organic farming
• Environmental assessment
• Environmental impacts
• Life cycle assessment
• France