Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is essential in the assessment of aquaculture production systems offering a comprehensive framework to evaluate the environmental impact. While LCA is a powerful method to assess the environmental footprint of aquaculture production systems it requires a high degree of specialized knowledge of LCA, its standards and guidelines. LCA software typically provides very open canvasses that allow LCA practitioners to model any system in any way that is applicable to their study. This is useful for LCA practitioners however, for industry stakeholders this freedom is impractical and without detailed knowledge of LCA leaves too many options for the user leading to inconsistencies. By providing tools to the aquaculture production sectors non-experts can be supported empowering them to take full advantage of LCA.
To support this Blonk Sustainability has worked with various stakeholders to develop tools for LCA assessments of aquaculture production systems for industry stakeholders. These tools cover various aquaculture production systems from tropical species such as Shrimp and Tilapia and cold-water species such as Atlantic salmon from feed to processing and distribution.
The robustness and consequently the applicability of LCA results that are generated through these tools are strongly dependent on various factors. We identify three main pillars: consistency, data quality, and completeness. By employing standardized tools consistency in underlying methods can be guaranteed. These methods include emission modelling, background process selection, and inclusion of relevant processes. This is especially relevant for sectors where standardization is not present. In these cases, the tool allows experts to take decisions ensuring well substantiated and documented methods which can be used consistently by industry stakeholders. The downside of these pre-defined systems is that when the use case does not connect to the parameters in the tools this use case cannot be performed with the tool. The second pillar, data quality is guaranteed in various ways. The primary data requirements are pre-defined and where required default data of sufficient quality is pre-defined. This simultaneously ensures the third pillar of completeness, as the tools enforce that data is complete before generating a result. A challenge here remains the fact that the data entered by the user remains an unknown in terms of quality.
The development of LCA tools for industry stakeholders is performed using a rigorous method. This rigor is necessary to ensure consistency, quality, and completeness. The tools developed for aquaculture production system empower stakeholders to measure and reduce their environmental impact without intervention of LCA experts. Enabling these businesses to change into more sustainable business based on solid LCA methods.