Can Italian wines outperform European benchmarks in environmental impact? An examination through the product environmental footprint method.

Nowadays, there is a pressing demand for precise tools to quantify sustainability and assess the contributions of products and processes to sustainable development. This requirement extends to the wine industry as well. In 2013, the European Commission introduced the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), providing a standardized methodology grounded in life cycle thinking for evaluating the environmental impacts of products across various industries. Despite its potential and the availability of specific guidelines for wine, the application of PEF remains unexplored in the sector. This study contributes to the knowledge by applying PEF to assess environmental impacts of Italian still and sparkling wines production, identifying variations from European benchmarks. Additionally, it aims to pinpoint pivotal hotspots and provide guidance for effective mitigation strategies. Average data from 27 wines certified as sustainable under Italian VIVA program, were collected and used to perform a life cycle assessment in accordance with PEF protocol. Results revealed that Italian still wines exhibited a greater environmental impact than the European reference value, while sparkling wines displayed a slightly more favourable environmental performance compared to the European average. Notably, specific impact categories remained consistent across different wines and countries, with climate change, resource utilization, land use, and particulate matter harmful for human health accounting for nearly 80 % of the overall environmental footprint. Hotspot analysis identified the plantation/destruction of vines, energy usage in the winery, and packaging as significant factors influencing the environmental footprint of Italian wines. Addressing these elements could enhance the environmental competitiveness of the Italian wine sector relative to its European counterparts. However, to validate these findings, further studies are necessary, both within Italy and in other European wine-producing regions. Such research initiatives will improve and strengthen PEF methodology, bolstering its adoption as the primary tool for environmental impact assessment of wine at the community level.

Development and testing of the Product Environmental Footprint Milk Tool: A comprehensive LCA tool for dairy products.

The paper describes the general structure of the PMT_01 tool developed to assess the environmental impacts of different dairy products as Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) cheeses of Lombardy Region (Po Valley - Northern Italy) and High Quality fresh pasteurized milk in a cradle-to-distribution center gate approach. Based on the PEF Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology, the authors aim to provide a useful instrument for technicians and researchers in the evaluation of the environmental load of dairy products, allowing the process-hotspots identification through 16 different impact categories. The tool requires a modest amount of data that can be easily collected at the farms and at the dairies. In order to test the tool's performance, the environmental impact of 10 g dry matter of Grana Padano PDO cheese was evaluated starting from the data of three different dairy farms used as "reference farming systems" and one dairy factory. A scenario and a sensitive analysis were also included in the study. The main contribution to most of the environmental impact categories was related to the raw milk production while the dairy factory process affected significantly only a few impact categories. The scenario analysis suggested that the anaerobic digestion could have a strong potential in the mitigation of the GHG emissions while the sensitive analysis confirmed that the choice of the allocation method at the dairy factory level is a key point in the methodological choices. Despite the test of the tool was done only on three farms and one dairy factory, the results were consistent with those of recent studies. Even if some improvements in the tool functionalities are needed, we believe that in the future it could be easily applied on a wider sample of farms and dairies, and used to guide the stakeholders through a responsible environmental strategy.