The latest LCA Food Conference took place between the 8th and 10th of October in the Hotel Nikko of San Francisco. GreenDelta was present and our colleague Cristina Rodríguez presented the new approach for regionalized LCIA in openLCA in the session “Tools”. During her speech, the new features included in the LCA software were shown, as well as results from a case study about corn production in five states of the USA. These results reinforced the importance of considering the spatial variable in agriculture. For further details please check the paper or the presentation slides.
There were also other interesting topics discussed during the conference. For instance, the linkage of nutrition and the environment was commented in several presentations showing the impact assessments of new and existing diets. In some cases, a change towards diets with less meat consumption was recommended in order to minimize global warming potentials. However, the common agreement was that improvements in the techniques across the whole life cycle were necessary in order to reduce the amount of wasted food (e.g. around 30% in the USA). For this, LCA tools could be a helpful tool for farmers and retailers, as proved the numerous case studies presented.