Environmental Analysis of a Mashed Tomato Production: an Italian Case Study

Abstract

The agri-food sector is one of the most impactful from the environmental point of view, due to resources depletion, land degradation and air emissions. Considering that, in the last years, consumers’ interest towards eco-friendly products is increasing, food industries aspire to reach more sustainable productions. In Italy, among vegetable crops that are processed and transformed in different derivatives, tomato ones are amongst the most commercialized. Mashed tomato represents about 50 % of packaged tomato marked volumes and, therefore, an environmental analysis of the emissions related to this production is a very timely topic. Therefore, the aim of this study is the analysis of the environmental performances of mashed tomato produced by a Southern Italy company using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, in order to select the most impacting phases and propose process changes to minimize the related emissions. The system boundaries were set from tomatoes’ transportation to the company up to mashed tomato packaging; therefore, they covered the industrial life-cycle stages, following a “from gate to gate” approach. Primary data were provided by the Italian company, whilst Ecoinvent database was used as source of secondary data; all data were, then, analysed using SimaPro 8.0.5 software, according to ISO 14040-14044, which is the reference standard for LCA. All the quantities related to materials, energy consumption and emissions to air, soil and water were reported to 500 g mashed tomato packaged in Tetra Pak as a reference product. The IMPACT 2002+ method was adopted to evaluate the effect of mashed tomato production on midpoint and endpoint categories.