Activities – LCA Food 2020

OLCA PEST workshop

Stakeholder workshop

Quantifying emissions and environmental impacts of pesticides in life cycle assessment: Building on the pesticide consensus effort.

Background: Current pesticide field emission modelling and toxicity characterisation approaches suffer from several shortcomings, including unclear boundaries between Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) and Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) phases, environmental compartment mismatches between LCI databases and LCIA methods, missing characterisation factors, compartments in impact assessment, and impact pathways. The Glasgow consensus workshop in 2013 started a consensus building process with three scientific workshops and a stakeholder workshop. In order to operationalise the resulting recommendations for harmonising the emission quantification and impact characterisation of pesticides in life cycle assessment (LCA) and product environmental footprinting, the OLCA-Pest project („Operationalising Life Cycle Assessment for Pesticides“, 2017-2020, funded by ADEME) was implemented with nine partner institutions. The present workshop informs about the main outcomes of the OLCA-Pest project and the consequences for LCI databases, LCIA assessment and LCA practice related to assessing pesticides in LCA.

Goals of the workshop:

Inform about the main outcomes and recommendations from the OLCA-Pest project as follow-up of the ‘pesticide consensus in LCA’ effort
Show the practical implications for LCI database developers, LCA software providers, LCA practitioners and decision makers
Show potentials and limitations of the proposed methodology, data and tools
Show the practical usage of the tools and methodologies developed within OLCA-Pest along LCA case studies in different agricultural systems