Global warming potential associated with Irish milk powder production

William Finnegan, Jamie Goggins, Aksana Chyzheuskaya, Xinmin Zhan

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Front. Environ. Sci. Eng. ›› 2017, Vol. 11 ›› Issue (3) : 12. DOI: 10.1007/s11783-017-0949-z
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Global warming potential associated with Irish milk powder production

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Highlights

Global warming potential of milk powder production in Ireland is assessed.

The GWP of 1 kg milk powder is 9.731 kg CO2eq.

The standard deviation for the GWP of 1 kg milk powder is 2.26 kg CO2eq.

The most significant contributor to GWP is raw milk production at 84%.

Processing of raw milk into milk powder accounts for 14% of the total GWP.

Abstract

Climate change is an ever growing issue and a major concern worldwide. Both producers and processors need to address the issue now by reducing their carbon footprint. Additionally, if Ireland is to meet their climate and energy targets, as outlined in Food Harvest 2020, which outlines a range of objectives for the Irish agricultural sector, the efficient use of resources and fuels within the industry will need to be increased. In Ireland, agriculture accounts for 29.2% of the total greenhouse gas emissions (58.5 million tonnes CO2eq). Therefore, in this paper, a single agri-food product, milk powder, is examined in order to estimate the global warming potential (GWP) associated with its manufacture using life cycle assessment. A cradle-to-processing factory gate analysis, which includes raw milk production, raw milk transportation to the processing factory, its processing into each product and product packaging, is assessed in this study using data collected circa 2013. The factories surveyed processed approximately 24% of the total raw milk processed in the Republic of Ireland in 2013, which was 5.83 billion liters. The average total GWP associated with the manufacture of milk powder is 9.731 kg CO2eq·kg1 milk powder, which has a standard deviation of 2.26 kg CO2eq·kg1 milk powder, for the life cycle stages analyzed in this study. The most significant contributor to GWP is raw milk production (84%), followed by dairy processing (14%), with the remainder of the life cycle stages contributing approximately 2%.

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Keywords

Dairy / Global warming potential / Ireland / Life cycle assessment / Milk powder / Milk production

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William Finnegan, Jamie Goggins, Aksana Chyzheuskaya, Xinmin Zhan. Global warming potential associated with Irish milk powder production. Front. Environ. Sci. Eng., 2017, 11(3): 12 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-017-0949-z

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the funding provided by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine for the DairyWater project (Ref.: 13-F-507); for additional details: www.dairywater.ie. The second author would like to acknowledge the support of Science Foundation Ireland through the Career Development Award program (No. 13/CDA/2200).

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2017 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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