Technology forecasting for prospective Life Cycle Assessment of low opportunity-cost biomass to livestock feed valorization pathways

Main Presenter:    Shaiyan Siddique 

Co-Authors:   Ian Turner     Nathan Pelletier                                          

Life Cycle Assessment has been the dominant approach to assess the environmental performance of agricultural sustainability initiatives for the last several decades. In recent years, economy-wide environmental footprint reduction targets have been adopted across the world, such as the 2050 net-zero greenhouse gas emissions target by the government of Canada and the European Union. Reducing the environmental impacts of livestock production will be a priority for meeting such targets, as it contributes a major share of the greenhouse gas and other environmental impacts of the overall economy. Innovative strategies to reduce the impact of feed production is currently at the forefront of research interests, since feed contributes the largest share of impacts of livestock production across most impact categories. The substitution of conventional feed ingredients such as corn, soy, and animal products with low opportunity-cost biomass such as food waste and agricultural residues are
considered to hold promising potential towards this end. Recent LCA studies on such valorization pathways indicate energy consumption and transportation to be key hotspots. Studies also highlight the important share of avoided landfill emissions towards the overall benefit profile of such systems at present. Since emissions from landfills are expected to decrease over the coming decades due to increased landfill gas collection, and global energy production is expected to become cleaner, it is important to assess the environmental impacts and benefits of such valorization pathways in the context of future realities for informed decision-making. Towards this end, a systematic literature review following the PRISMA method was conducted to gain insights about the current status quo about technology forecasting methods. Literature on prospective LCA of biomass-based systems was also reviewed. The review found the prominence of expert, citation, and computer modelling-based methods for
foreground and background inventory forecasting for prospective LCA in the literature. Afterwards, a literature review, citation network, and computer modelling based method was used to forecast the environmental impacts and benefits of a commercial-scale food waste to poultry feed case study for the year 2050. It was found that the food waste valorization system may continue to provide environmental benefits in the future due to forecasted technological and energy efficiency improvements, even without avoided landfill emission credits.

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