FoodCarbonScopeTM  a food/agriculture LCA tool from  CleanMetrics                                        

FoodCarbonScope is a web-based LCA software tool for the modeling and analysis of life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy use and water use in food and beverage products. FoodCarbonScope has been expertly designed from the ground up to help the food and beverage industry meet the challenges of sustainable production and consumption.

Key Benefits

  • Provides an interactive, easy-to-use platform for analyzing complex product supply chains.
  • Comprehensive analysis, covering all life cycle stages from cradle to grave (agriculture, processing/packaging, distribution, retail, cooking, waste disposal, etc.) and accounting for all GHG emissions and resource use.
  • Comes with the largest commercially available life cycle inventory (LCI) database for North American food production and processing, , as well as additional data for Europe and other parts of the world.
  • Delivers standards-compliant life cycle assessment (LCA) results at a fraction of the typical costs associated with conventional LCAs of food and beverages.
  • Can be used for both product LCAs and corporate value chain (scope 3) analysis.
  • Highly customizable to match the level of detail needed for the problem at hand.
  • Targets the three environmental metrics that are most critical for businesses and consumers: GHG emissions, energy use and water use.

Features

FoodCarbonScope offers a complete set of modeling and analysis features needed to analyze both simple and complex product life cycles in the food and beverage industry.

  • Detailed supply chain structures can be constructed using a simple point-and-click interface.
  • GHG emissions, energy use and water use in agricultural production can be modeled comprehensively, including:
  • Contributions of all inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, electricity/fuel, and freight transport.
  • Non-energy GHG emissions at the farm level due to issues such as waste/manure management, crop residues, biological nitrogen fixation, nitrogen fertilizer use, enteric fermentation, flooding of rice fields, etc.
  • Carbon emissions from agricultural soils, and carbon sequestration in agricultural soils and biomass.
  • Full accounting of food processing and cooking, choosing from a full range of commercial equipment and processes.
  • Packaging materials and configurations – including both primary and secondary packaging – can be easily modeled for both raw food commodities and processed foods.
  • Transport – including multi-modal domestic and international freight transport with/without refrigeration – and refrigerated storage of raw and processed food products can be readily included throughout the supply chain.
  • Optionally, both domestic and international transport distance calculations can be automated by accessing the built-in mapping and routing module.
  • Management of food and packaging waste – including options such as composting and landfilling in different climate zones, and energy recovery through methane capture and incineration – can be incorporated throughout the supply and consumption chain.
  • An extensive LCI database provides comprehensive coverage of all aspects of food/beverage life cycles and allows for rapid development of accurate product life cycle models.
  • Flexible modeling approach allows users to optionally input their own proprietary agricultural production and/or processing data to model specific farms, suppliers or processing facilities at various levels of detail.
  • Detailed results are reported live on screen and saved to spreadsheets with full supporting documentation.
  • All user data is private and stored on users' own hard disks.

For more information, please review the product technical brief.

Applications

Analysis and results from FoodCarbonScope can be used in a variety of applications:

  • Product eco-labeling – including carbon and water footprint labels – and other business-to-business and business-to-consumer sustainability communications.
  • Competitive environmental benchmarking of food and beverage products.
  • Identification of environmental hotspots and other inefficiencies in supply chains.
  • Comparative evaluation of alternative suppliers, logistics, packaging and processing.
  • Analysis of “what-if” scenarios to evaluate the potential benefits of supply-chain modifications and optimizations.
  • Reporting of corporate value chain (scope 3) GHG emissions, along with scope 1 and scope 2 emissions.

Standards

FoodCarbonScope complies with applicable international standards (ISO 14040 series, PAS 2050) for life-cycle assessment and product carbon footprint analysis, and will comply with other major standards that are in development.