Life Cycle Assessment in Animal Production Systems

Abstract

The life cycle assessment (LCA) method, which evaluates the environmental impacts associated with a product, process or activity during its life cycle by describing its requirements for resource and the emissions, is expected to be highly effective for comprehensive environmental evaluations. An increasing environmental consciousness in society requires action by the animal industry on environmental problems, and evaluation of whole animal production systems from various environmental viewpoints has been required to reduce environmental impacts of animal production systems. Thus, studies about evaluation of using LCA and development of evaluation methods based on the LCA concept for animal production systems have been conducted in recent years. In this paper, we reviewed LCA studies on animal production reported, and furthermore, presented the studies that evaluated beef production and feeds prepared from food residues as examples of our research about environmental impact evaluation of animal production systems. Finally, we described challenges and future works in the research area of LCA for animal production.