What is your choice for shopping? Sustainable product guidelines can help your purchase? Regulations, standards, and certification systems related to reduction of greenhouse gases have been strengthened in concern for... [ view full abstract ]
What is your choice for shopping? Sustainable product guidelines can help your purchase? Regulations, standards, and certification systems related to reduction of greenhouse gases have been strengthened in concern for responding to climate change. As the biggest goal in agriculture was strengthening production until 1990s, chemical fertilizers and agricultural chemicals have been added more than necessary. This high input agriculture caused various environmental problems such as tolerance to pest damage, emissions of human and ecological toxic substances, and acidification of soil. Interest in such environmental problems began to strive with sustainable agriculture, and like environmentally-friendly agriculture certificate, which is one of the eco-labelling for agricultural products.
This study is to evaluate the environmental impacts quantitatively on the rice production process by environmentally-friendly agricultural product certification system (low-pesticide, non-pesticide, organic farming) using the life cycle assessment method and compared it including conventional rice farming.
Functional unit in rice cultivation process was set 1kg of rice farming and the system boundary was set up to include all nursery seedlings, formalities, cultivation and harvesting procedures according to functional unit. The climate change potential is evaluated as 1.01 kg CO2-equivalents in the conventional farming, 0.701 kg CO2-equiv. (69%) in case of low-pesticide certified production, 0.537 kg CO2-equiv. (53%) in the case of non-pesticide certified production, 0.234 kg CO2-equiv. (23%) in the case of organic certified production, which were analyzed respectively. In the case of acidification potential, organic certified production (3.13E-04 mole of H + equiv.) is about 51% lower than the existing conventional farming (6.33E-04 mole of H + equiv.). In the case of the eutrophication potential in the aquatic system, it was analyzed that the reduction effect of organic (6.47E-09 kg P-equiv.) was very large compared with conventional (6.03E-06 kg P-equiv.).
There is a limit of materials due to the absence of the actually investigated database. Therefore, it is necessary that life cycle inventory conduct based on the input and output data of the whole process including the upstream process in order to evaluate the objective and highly reliable results and compare the environmental impact of the rice production process with other countries.
