Carbon Footprint

Each product has an impact on the environment, such as CO₂, land use and use of resources. Environmental footprinting, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Carbon Footprinting are methods to investigate the environmental impact of products and supply chains. These methods give insights in possible (environmental) improvements in the supply chain.

Blonk carried out a CO₂ baseline measurement (carbon footprint) for Nature’s Pride, a company based in the Netherlands. Nature’s Pride supplies 230 different fruit and vegetable products from 59 countries, such as avocados, berries, ginger and papayas. One of their aims is to make the world healthier and more sustainable. In pursuit of this aim the company runs various projects on packaging and reducing food losses and also supports projects to improve living conditions in communities where they source their products. The results of our baseline study will help Nature’s Pride to understand how they can best reduce their CO₂ emissions and set goals to achieve this.

Climate change being one of the most urgent challenges of our time. Society is looking for ways to define the contours of a sustainable world. Accordingly, more and more companies are joining programs to set sustainability targets. 

Sustainability Target Setting start with a complete analysis and reduction plan of GHG emissions of the entire value chain. A challenging task, which asks for profound knowledge of agri-food value chains, quantitative environmental analysis and acquires high-quality data.

Deforestation is one of the major issues facing the global agriculture production system, with as much 8% of global CO₂ emissions being attributable to land use change. A well-known example is deforestation for the cultivation of crops such as soybean and oil palm. 

A big challenge for Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) researchers is to translate this impact of land use change to specific crops from specific countries while little primary data is available. Our ‘LUC Impact Tool’ is specifically designed to address this challenge.

LUC Impact is an Excel tool which provides a predefined way of calculating GHG emissions from LUC.

The training Land Use Change (LUC) Accounting is a 4-hour, interactive session around the topic of Land Use Change and how we can properly account for it. The training provides you with a lot of context, background information and critical perspectives on the multiple methodological choices and challenges related to LUC accounting.

The GFLI - the Global Feed LCA Institute - is an independent animal nutrition and food industry institute with the purpose of developing a publicly available Animal Nutrition Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) database. One of the institute’s projects is to develop a freely available LCA feed database. This free database contains high quality datasets for feed ingredients. The database has been developed by Blonk Consultants in conjunction with the Agri-footprint database (LCA food database) and in accordance with the GFLI methodology. The GFLI database is the main international source of LCA information on animal feed production and contribute to making the sector more sustainable. 

The GFLI database contains environmental impact data of raw feed materials, available from different geographical areas. Included are regional, sectoral and branded data. Regional data is primarily based on our LCA database Agri-footprint. Sectoral and branded data are being added at every update, continuously improving and expanding the database to stimulate continuous improvement of the environmental performance in the feed industry.