PRIN 2017 – protocollo: 2017EC9WF2
PROMOTING AGRI-FOOD SUSTAINABILITY: DEVELOPMENT OF AN ITALIAN LIFE CYCLE INVENTORY DATABASE OF AGRI-FOOD PRODUCTS
The absence of an Italian database for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies of agri-food products is a very sensitive issue by experts and scholars in the sector, as the databases currently available on the market are of foreign origin and are not fully applicable to the Italian agri-food sector. The PRIN Research Project “Promoting Agri-Food Sustainability: “ILCIDAF” (Italian Life Cycle Inventory Database of Agrifoods) sought to overcome this limit with the aim of developing an Italian Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database of the most relevant agri-food products – bread and pasta, wine, olive oil and citrus – that could serve to favour the development of Italian LCA studies related to national agri-food chains. Starting from the analysis of the current databases, the Italian database of the aforementioned supply lines was built by defining a common and coherent methodology, applicable transversally to all the supply lines under study. The approach followed was that of ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 of 2006: it provided for the production of original inventories derived from statistical, literature and field data relating to these food supply lines. The boundaries of the system considered for the development of the dataset were extended from the agricultural phase, to the industrial phase and up to the final waste disposal. The realised database, which consists of 928 data sets on excel (xls) files, was uploaded to a website, specially created www.lcafoodilcidaf.it, open source of free consultation and use by all analysts of Italian and non-Italian and non-LCA.
All the contents on this website, as well as the ILCIDAF Portal itself, were realised as part of the PRIN Project “Promoting Agri-Food Sustainability: Development of an Italian LCI Database of Agri-Food Products (ILCIDAF)” (PRIN – Research Projects of National Interest 2017- Prot. 2017EC9WF2, ERC SH2 sector, C-line funded by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR).
