Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cooling systems, elaborate environmental monitoring and controls, a need for arti-
ficial lighting, winter carbon dioxide supplementation, and very high labour costs).
The main disadvantage of the low-cost production areas was the need for relatively
long distance transportation of the harvested flowers (invariably air transport). In
earlier times there was little visible consideration of the environmental footprint
(externalities) of flower production in low-cost regions, or where large projects
were built in developing countries, partially on the basis on the grounds of improv-
ing local employment, wages and living standards.
By the early 2000's, people began considering the carbon footprint of many
products including transportation, lifestyle, food and, ultimately flower production.
A carbon footprint may be defined as: “the quantity of greenhouse gases (GHG),
expressed in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO
2
e), emitted across the supply chain for
a single unit of that product” (Bockel et al.
2011
). Ideally, a cradle to grave, full life
cycle assessment is made, including the consumer phase, but with many products,
flowers being one, the CO
2
cost of nominally tossing them onto the compost pile is
minimal compared with carbon costs for heating greenhouses, operating assimila-
tion lights, air freight or surface delivery. By necessity, many assumptions are made
when calculating the carbon footprint. The International Organization for Standard-
ization (ISO) has guidelines to help determine the carbon footprint. The main steps
are to (1) define the goal and scope of the study to define boundaries, limitations,
exclusions and procedures for determining the impact of processes when multiple
products or functions can contribute; and (2) create a life cycle inventory, which for
carbon dioxide, is the flow of CO
2
to and from nature and which carefully considers
all inputs from the natural or man-made supply chain and emissions back to nature.
The third step assesses the impact of the life cycle impact of all factors noted in
the inventory are compared in equivalent terms to determine their environmental
impact. Factors may be normalized or weighted according to parameters set out
in the goals and scope process. The fourth step interprets and summarizes the re-
sults of the assessment phase with the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal “identifies
the data elements that contribute significantly to each impact category, evaluating
the sensitivity of these significant data elements, assessing the completeness and
consistency of the study, and drawing conclusions and recommendations based on
a clear understanding of how the LCA was conducted and the results were devel-
oped” (Anon
2013m
).
Based on the above, there are few full and accurate CO
2
footprint assessments
of floricultural products. One of the few is the life cycle comparison of CO
2
emis-
sions for rose production in Kenya (sunny, excellent climate, requiring only mini-
mally protective greenhouses, but requiring air freight shipment of the roses) versus
“local” production in the Netherlands (high technology greenhouses, assimilation
lighting, large heat requirement, but minimal local transportation requirements).
The study at Cranfield University, England (Williams
2007
) was essentially a “cra-
dle to gate” analysis that ended with delivery of Dutch or Kenyan flowers to a
distribution centre in the Netherlands. This allowed a direct comparison of the CO
2
cost of each production system in the supply chain.
Key findings were that carbon dioxide represented more than 90 % of the global
warming potential (GWP) emitted by both systems. Production of 12,000 roses in
