Authors
Villanueva Rey, Pedro; Poceiro, Lucia; Quiñoy, Diego; Perez, Concepcion; Rodriguez, Eduardo
Abstract
Seafood supply chain depends highly on large expenditures of energy, mainly fossil fuels (e.g., fishing and manufacturing operations), leading to significant carbon emissions. Many studies have evaluated the environmental performance of seafood supply chain through life cycle assessment (LCA). Commonly for seafood supply chain analysis, LCA practitioners model electricity inventories based on default country data or adapting country production mix datasets for a given year. However, electricity from the grid shall be modeled as precisely as possible and, in case of electricity generated from renewable sources, it is important that no double counting occurs when it is sold through the Guarantee of Origin (GO) system. Therefore, it is needed a residual mix that represents shares of electricity generation after the use of tracking systems (GO). The use of the country residual mix is already implemented in the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method proposed by the European Commission. However, the approach has not been widely implemented so far because it can be too complex, and it is intended for a limited a set of products in the framework of the PEF pilot phase studies. In this sense, the NEPTUNUS project develops a methodological guide to account energy and electricity modeling aiming at seafood energy foot-printing based on PEF method. The guide provides guidelines for the calculation of the energy footprint of seafood products, handling multi-functional processes, inventory modelling, allocation strategies, life-cycle inventory modelling, etc. Apart from energy foot-printing, the NEPTUNUS project proposes an integrated methodological guideline —i.e., eco-labeling— for the energy-carbon-water and nutritional foot-printing of seafood products in the European Atlantic Area based on the Water-Energy-Seafood Nexus approach.