Air treatment technologies in pig farms. Life cycle assessment of dry and wet scrubbers in Northern Italy and Northeastern Spain.

Over the years, different solutions were developed and tested to reduce the emissions of ammonia and particulate matter from the livestock facilities. The environmental performances of these solutions were not always evaluated in detail. This study examines the environmental footprint of pig production at farm gate, with a focus on emissions from housing. Using Life Cycle Assessment, the environmental impact of pig production in a transition farm in Spain and in two finishing farms in Italy was evaluated considering three scenarios (one baseline and two of them involving an air treatment technology: wet scrubber or dry scrubber). The study goal was to quantify the environmental footprint of pig production in different scenarios, identify key environmental hotspots, and to assess impact reduction efficiency due to the two assessed technologies, analyze the environmental trade-offs that come with the use of these technologies, and identify potential for improvements. Both wet and dry scrubbers showed potential for reducing emissions in pig housing, affecting environmental impact categories related to air pollutants such as particulate matter, acidification and eutrophication. However, there were trade-offs between emissions reduction and categories related to energy and resource use. The infrastructure and consumables required to operate the scrubber added to the impacts compared to the baseline. The dry scrubber showed a more favorable balance between emission reduction and trade-offs. In this regard, results were similar for the Spanish and Italian farms, although there were slight variations. Scrubbers had a greater effect in the Italian farms due to their use along longer periods of the pig fattening (closed cycle farms) compared to the Spanish farm (transition farm). Scrubbers are environmentally promising, especially where acidification, eutrophication and particulate matter are local problems. However, they alone cannot fully address the complex environmental impacts of pig production, which require comprehensive interventions across the supply chain.

Environmental effect of improved forage fertilization practices in the beef production chain.

Feeding is one of the most important factors influencing production efficiency and the environmental impact of livestock production. This study evaluates the possibility of reducing the impact of beef cattle production by optimizing the fertilization management of home-grown forage on the same farms. To this end, two scenarios were compared on two beef cattle farms in northern Italy, a baseline scenario (BS) and a scenario with optimized management (OMS) in terms of nitrogen fertilizer use. The cradle-to-gate LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) approach was used to compare the environmental performances in the different scenarios. Two different functional units (1 t dry matter of forage self-produced and 1 kg live weight of beef cattle produced) were used to express the results in relation to different stages of the supply chain. Inventory data were translated into indicators to reflect environmental pressures as well as resource scarcity by means of the ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint (H) method. The reduction of synthetic nitrogen fertilization, particularly during top fertilization, maintain yields at satisfactory levels while substantially reducing most of the evaluated impacts (e.g., Climate change from 17 % to 23 %). On the other hand, trade-offs among the different impact categories can be identified (e.g., terrestrial acidification grows up to 52 % for wheat silage). The optimization of the fertilization also involves a reduction in the impact of the feed as a whole and then of the beef cattle produced, even though the increasing number of external inputs, not affected by best fertilization practices, for each of these two phases leads to increasingly smaller reductions in impact. Ultimately, the optimization of internal crop production practices is important from an environmental point of view for farms but represents only one of the possible mitigation interventions necessary to mitigate the entire agricultural supply chain.

Consumer awareness of sustainable supply chains: A choice experiment on Parma ham PDO.

The food system produces emissions at all stages, from agriculture and its inputs, and the livestock sector is nowadays one of the most significant contributors to environmental problems. The European swine production system is mainly intensive and generates high external costs such as water and air pollution. As a response to these emerging issues, there is a growing interest in the relationships between marketing and sustainability, with people that have begun to pay much more attention to health, environmental friendliness, and quality of products. The aim of this study is to understand if there is a market for a high-quality "Parma ham PDO", produced in sustainable supply chain at an environmental, health and animal welfare level. In this paper, we use discrete choice experiments to investigate Italian consumer's preferences and their willingness to pay (WTP) for Parma ham PDO with different characteristics, amongst which the use of air scrubber technology reducing pollutants emissions. Results seem to encourage the pork industry in better exploring pollutant emissions' reduction, showing a consumers' willingness to pay for this production technology. Similarly, results of this study can suggest the existence of a niche market for this typology of production.

Comparative life cycle assessment of conventional and organic hazelnuts production systems in Central Italy.

Agricultural activity is responsible of considerable negative effects on the environment. In this context, in the last years, organic cultivation is increasing being perceived as more sustainable for the environmental. Nevertheless, this higher sustainability compared to conventional agricultural systems is debated. This applied for crops but also for livestock systems. For some of the main crops (i.e., cereals, soybean) comparative analysis were carried out but for most of the other annual and perennial crops there is a lack of information about the environmental impact related to conventional and organic cultivation In this study, the environmental impact of the conventional and organic farming systems of hazelnuts production in Viterbo province in Italy was evaluated using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach. Even if originally developed for industrial processes, LCA is more and more applied also to agriculture systems to quantify the environmental impact. Primary data were collected by the main Producer Organization and elaborated considering 1 kg of hazelnuts as functional unit and a from cradle to gate approach considering the 50-years as life cycle duration of the crop. Finally, using the Recipe characterization method, 15 midpoint impact categories were evaluated. The results show how, except than for ecotoxicity related impact categories, organic cultivation practice shows higher impact (from +5% to +285%) respect to the conventional production. For ecotoxicity related impact categories, organic hazelnut production performs better (from -42% to -81%) than the conventional one because no synthetic pesticides are applied. The sensitivity analysis carried shows how yield is the main driver of the environmental results while the uncertainty analysis performed with the Monte Carlo technique shows that the to the selection of the data source, model imprecision and data variability does not significantly affect the environmental results for the evaluated impact categories.

Comparison of ammonia air concentration before and during the spread of COVID-19 in Lombardy (Italy) using ground-based and satellite data.

Several anthropogenic activities have undergone major changes following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn has had consequences on the environment. The effect on air pollution has been studied in detail in the literature, although some pollutants, such as ammonia (NH3), have received comparatively less attention to date. Focusing on the case of Lombardy in Northern Italy, this study aimed to evaluate changes in NH3 atmospheric concentration on a temporal scale (the years from 2013 to 2019 compared to 2020) and on a spatial scale (countryside, city, and mountain areas). For this purpose, ground-based (from public air quality control units scattered throughout the region) and satellite observations (from IASI sensors on board MetOp-A and MetOp-B) were collected and analyzed. For ground-based measurements, a marked spatial variability is observed between the different areas while, as regards the comparison between periods, statistically significant differences were observed only for the countryside areas (+31% in 2020 compared to previous years). The satellite data show similar patterns but do not present statistically significant differences neither between different areas, nor between the two periods. In general, there have been no reduction effects of atmospheric NH3 as a consequence of COVID-19. This calls into question the role of the agricultural sector, which is known to be the largest responsible for NH3 emissions. Even if the direct comparison between the two datasets shows little correlation, their contextual consideration allows making more robust considerations regarding air pollutants.