On November 22, a technical cooperation agreement for life cycle assessment (LCA) studies between Embrapa, ecoinvent, the Espaço Eco Foundation (FEE, from the acronym in Portuguese), the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), and other partners will be signed at Embrapa's headquarters in Brasília, DF, Brazil.

The formalization of the initiative took place through the call for tenders "Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data collection, dataset creation and submission to ecoinvent", issued by the program "Sustainable Recycling Industries" (SRI), ecoinvent's partner, in February 2016.

Embrapa had a project submission approved, entitled "Life Cycle Inventories of Brazilian agricultural products: a contribution to the ecoinvent database – ICVAgroBR".

According to the researcher from Embrapa Environment (Jaguariúna, SP) Marilia Folegatti, who is the ICVAgroBR project coordinator, Embrapa coordinates a team composed of another five institutions: CNPEM; FEE; the Swiss Confederation, represented by the Federal Office for Agriculture (Agroscope); and Quantis Sàrl. The proposal has gathered a multidisciplinary team, which includes specialists in agricultural, forest and livestock production systems in different Brazilian regions, as well as national and international experts in LCA who are qualified for LCI data collection, creation, validation, documentation and dataset submission, and are e familiar with Ecoinvent's database standards.

The project aims to provide the ecoinvent databse with inventories that are representative of the typical production systems of some of the most important Brazilian agribusiness products: sugarcane, soybeans, maize, mango, eucalyptus and beef cattle. It will also supply datasets on sugarcane production in Colombia. Finally, the target is to establish critical mass to influence the land use change model adopted by ecoinvent for future initiatives to regionalize the model in the Brazilian context.

The ecoinvent, which is managed by the Swiss institutions Agroscope, Empa, ETH Lausanne, ETH Zurich and The Paul Scherrer Institute, is the main and most complete international database of life cycle inventories, gathering thousands of datasets and over 6,000 users. The database encompasses inventories for agricultural, forest and agroindustrial products.

Marilia highlights that ecoinvent's most distinctive points are data credibility and transparency, as well as the independence from host institutions. "The ecoinvent initiative has recently defined a policy to involve research institutions from other countries in the elaboration of inventories for their database, and Embrapa is among one of the chosen ones to participate in the program".

"For collaborators like Embrapa, publishing in this database is a means to have inventories generated for national conditions (at national, regional or local level), which faithfully represent national production processes, reach the international community. Moreover, the publication gives credibility to the data and enables inventory compatibility and the comparison of processes and products (through methodological standards), in line with the strategy defined by the Embrapa LCA Network for the elaboration of Brazilian agricultural product LCIs", asserts the researcher.

Once published by ecoinvent, the Brazilian datasets will also be made available by the National Life Cycle Inventory Database – (SICV Brasil), organized by the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT), under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Brazil. The project's contribution of Brazilian product inventories to SICV Brasil is important to disseminate LCA in the country's production sector.

Learn more
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a quantitative tool to estimate the environmental impact of products based on Life Cycle Inventories (LCI). An LCI records the consumption of materials and energy as well as the emissions from all the production processesinvolved in the product's life cycle. It consists of a comprehensive detailed data survey, which requires a lot of time and resources, and which can be facilitated by the use of databases. However, the main international databases available today have few inventories of Brazilian products.
 

Translation: Mariana de Lima Medeiros