Authors
Qalase, Chule; Harding, Kevin
Abstract
Worldwide, pork consumption has increased as a supply of animal protein in the first and developing countries such as South Africa. The expanding interest in pig products will bring extra pressure on natural resources, as water and land are needed to produce pork. This study’s main goal was to evaluate the pork product system’s sustainability through eco-efficiency assessment based on this pork’s growing demand. Two sustainability tools have been used to determine the pork production subsystems’ economic and environmental performances: life cycle assessment (LCA) and Environmental Life Cycle Costing (eLCC) to determine the eco-efficiency of the product system. The ratio of three environmental damages—human health, eco-system quality, resource availability and, Value-Added (VA) as an economic performance indicator was used to calculate this study’s eco-efficiency. In the study, the functional unit was 1 kg of pork carcass, specifically from the cradle to the farm gate. These results were determined by the ReCiPe 2016 & IMPACT 2002 methods through Simapro 9.0 version with eco-invent 3.5 database was used in this study. The study showed that pork production had an eco-efficiency of 5.61 × 10-7 DALY/ ZAR/units, 2.84 × 10_-9 species.yr/ ZAR units and 1.05 × 10-2 USD 2013/ ZAR in human health, eco-system quality and resource availability categories, respectively. Therefore, this study achieved its goal as economic and environmental areas of interest were identified in this specific case study for South Africa. This framework could be extended to study the eco-efficiency of other meat production chains and other sectors. Keywords: Pork production, Life cycle assessment, Life cycle costing, Value-added; eco-efficiency assessment