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DCA Publikationer Environmental Assessment of Danish Pork Intern rapport, nr. 103, 2011 Af Thu Lan T. Nguyen, John E. Hermansen, Lisbeth Mogensen  The aim of this report is to present an environmental profile of Danish pork through a life cycle assessment (LCA). In LCA two different approaches are often used: an attributional approach and a consequential approach. Basically, the attributional approach describes the resources used and emissions engendered to produce the product in question (here one kg of pork), whereas the consequential approach accounts for the resources used and associated emissions when producing one kg of pork more. This choice of methodologies impacts on the results, since the attributional approach uses information of impacts related to e.g. the specific feed production, whereas the consequential approach relies on data on e.g. the environmental cost to produce the feed necessary for the production of one extra kg of pork. Both methods are being used and a previous life cycle assessment of Danish pork used the consequential methodology. However, the Publicly Available Specification for documenting the global warming potential or the carbon footprint of a product, (PAS 2050), requires the attributional approach to be used. In the present report, therefore, the assessment used both methods. The PAS 2050 in addition has the option of including the impact on the global warming potential of land use changes following the production of feed. The basis for doing this is, however, not sufficiently developed, and therefore this aspect was not included in the present work for any of the methods. If included, the global warming impact would be higher. |