Spatial Life Cycle Assessment Methods for Green Supply Chain Management: A Case Study on the U.S. Pork Industry

Green supply chain management (GSCM) efforts are often hindered by having limited visibility beyond tier 1 suppliers and having environmental information only available at the national scale. Due to the heterogeneity of... [ view full abstract ]

Green supply chain management (GSCM) efforts are often hindered by having limited visibility beyond tier 1 suppliers and having environmental information only available at the national scale. Due to the heterogeneity of management practices and environmental conditions that cause significant differences in environmental impacts across the supply chain landscape, particularly in agricultural supply chains, spatially explicit environmental information at a more granular scale than the typical national level is essential. However, such spatial analyses are resource and time intensive due to the significant amount of data necessary for such an assessment. To reduce the costs of spatial LCA’s, streamlined spatial assessment methods that focus on the hotspots of supply chains are proposed. In conjunction with newly available inter-regional commodity flow information, these streamlined spatial LCA methods are demonstrated for the U.S. pork industry, allowing for company-specific, spatially explicit supply chain environmental impacts to be estimated. The supply chain hotspots spatially differentiated and analyzed at the county scale include fertilizer manufacturing, on-field nitrous oxide emissions and irrigation in corn feed production, manure management in swine production, and electricity usage in pork processing. Company-specific sourcing locations are prioritized for GSCM engagement resources across supply chain stages based on a ranking system considering two metrics - total impacts and impact intensity. Substantial variation across company supply chains and across supply chain stages highlights the value of streamlined spatial methods for better prioritizing GSCM resources. Aggregating GHG emissions across all U.S. pork companies allows for a first-ever bottom-up assessment of total U.S. pork industry impacts. Results show the top five pork producing companies contribute about 75% of total pork industry emissions, so improvement efforts made in these supply chains could substantially improve the overall climate change contribution from the Pork industry and associated downstream consumption.