William Finnegan
National University of Ireland Galway
Dr William Finnegan graduated form NUI Galway in 2013 and is now working as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Civil Engineering at NUI Galway on the DairyWater project.
At the end of 2015, climate change once again came to the fore as a topic of discussion in Ireland as world leaders negotiated the Paris Agreement at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21). This global agreement outlines the methods and aims for the reduction of climate change. Currently, the Republic of Ireland is on the brink of a new era for the dairy industry as quotas, which restricted milk production since 1984, were abolished in March 2015. As a result, milk production is expected to increase by 50% by 2020, based on the reference years 2007 to 2009. Furthermore, if Ireland is to meet their climate and energy targets, as outlined in Food Harvest 2020, the efficient use of resources and fuels within the industry will need to be increased.
The primary aim of this study is to estimate the contribution of the Irish dairy processing sector to climate change and, consequently, highlight a number of areas where plans may be implemented in order to achieve more ‘environmentally friendly’ production of dairy products in Ireland. In this study, an environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) was performed in order to estimate the impact of the Irish dairy processing industry on climate change. The global warming potential (GWP), which is the measure of climate change, associated with a farm gate to processing factory gate analysis, which includes raw milk transportation to the processing factory, processing of raw milk into each product and packaging of the final product, is assessed in this study. In the analysis presented in this paper, the total average GWP for these life cycle stages is found to be 1.507, 0.469, 0.188, 0.187, 2.906, 0.48 and 2.381 kg CO2 eq. per kg product for milk powder, butter, fluid milk, cream, infant formula, cheese and whey powder, respectively. Additionally, an uncertainty analysis of the results is performed and a comparison of these results with international studies are included in this paper. The analysis presented in this paper helps to identify opportunities to reduce the GWP associated with post-farm processing of Irish dairy products.
