In Europe data on carbon footprint and LCA is becoming more relevant for feed production, in certain countries it is already obligatory to deliver this data. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) based methods are widely used to deliver accurate, quantified clear information on environmental, social or economic impacts of products helping in the decision-making process. In Europe, a big initiative took place in 2013, called Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) with the goal to create a “Single Market for Green Products” offering a standard for impact assessment of products and organisations, creating and testing rules recommended set of methods from among the huge number of available options, thus enhancing transparency and fair competition.
More and more transparency about Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) aspects of companies and value chains are required. Good practices such as Life Cycle Management (LCM) have a great potential to reduce risks and increase competitiveness. In the environmental pillar, climate change adaptation and mitigation are part of a global agenda guided by Paris Agreement commitments defined by governments.
The challenge
Environmental indicators are not collected in a structured way, and this can lead to confusion and even differing results for the same products depending on the applied methodology.
The current system is unfair towards organisations that invest in sustainably produced and land conversion free raw materials, because the twenty years period cannot be proven in most cases (due to cut-off dates, low resolution, costs or non-existing data).
The ProTerra standard is a deforestation free standard with a cut-off date of 2008. That means we cannot guarantee LUC free areas for 20 years and primary data is required to be able to show that the crops produced under the standard have better figures than non-certified crops (mainly soy and sugarcane).
Over the years, the ProTerra Foundation has made many improvements to meet these new environmental impact requirements for agricultural raw materials, including the inclusion of traceable data, starting with the carbon footprint indicator of soy-derived products.
The ProTerra Foundation, in partnership with external experts, developed a tool to calculate GHG emissions, comprising methods to estimate land use change (LUC) and the resulting GHG rates. The main objective of this project is to differentiate from non-certified products by providing buyers with ProTerra-specific data for the calculation of GHG. The results of this project can be found here.
Before ProTerra implementation of the Carbon Footprint calculator, members have been forced to calculate CF using default data, which, in most cases, creates a disadvantage for them. Now, certified organisations that invest in sustainably produced are able to inform specific data, but still face big challenges for producing evidence on land transition pathways in a 20-year period. ProTerra updated the results in 2021 with the aim to analyse the environmental footprint of the ProTerra Standard certified soybean and soybean meal and oil. The environmental impact categories in scope were carbon footprint, water consumption and land use. The environmental footprint included the following life cycle stages: soybean cultivation, transport from farm to crusher, soybean crushing and transport to the European market.
Conclusion
It’s known that results may vary depending on real sourcing data of a specific crusher and the region of origination. While ProTerra is working on collecting and systematizing data, some small adjustments can be done in the presented calibration results in order to create an average profile for ProTerra. From the analysis it can be concluded that the availability of more high-quality (primary) data is crucial to make more accurate calculations. In order to be able to make claims, company-specific data should be used instead of secondary data from LCA databases.
Based on market demand, we will continue to establish and improve such projects every year and work together with organisations such as GFLI to unify the used databases and improve LCA calculations.
Emese van Maanen, Managing Director, ProTerra Foundation