Life cycle assessment of heavy pig production in a sample of Italian farms

Abstract Text: The purpose of this study was to estimate the environmental impact of breeding and fattening of heavy pig used for Italian cured ham production. For this purpose, a life cycle assessment (LCA) was applied to two samples of 4 breeding farms and of 8 fattening farms. The functional unit was 1 kg of body weight of fattened pig. The system was subdivided into breeding and fattening phases. The following impact categories were analyzed: global warming (GW), abiotic resource depletion (AD), photochemical ozone formation (PO), acidification (AC), and eutrophication (EU). Reference units were kg of CO₂eq for GW, kg of Sbeq for AD, kg of C₂H₄eq for PO, kg of SO₂eq for AC, and kg of PO₄^3-eq for EU. System boundaries included the following farm activities : (1) on-farm energy consumption (EC); (2) manure management (MM); (3) manure application (MA); (4) on -farm feed production (ONFP); (5) off-farm feed production (OFFP); (6) enteric fermentation (ENF); (7) transports (TR). Average final body weight was 167±5.2. LCA was performed with the support of SimaPro 7.3.3 software. The average environmental impacts associated with 1 kg of fattened pig body weight were: GW 3.43 kgCO₂eq, AD 3.13 E-3 kg Sbeq, PO 1.78 E-3 kg C₂H₄eq, AC 5.37 E-2 kg SO₂eq, EU 3.20 E-2 kg PO₄^3-eq. Percentage contribution of breeding and fattening phases to GW, AC, PO, AC, and EU were: 30 and 70; 23 and 77; 31 and 69; 37and 63;30 and 70 respectively.

Normalization analysis showed that the major contributions to the environmental impact of 1 kg of fattened pig body weight come from GW, AC and EU, whereas AD and PO are negligible.

Keywords: heavy pig; life cycle assessment; sustainability