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Social life cycle assessment of average Irish dairy farm

  • SOCIETAL LCA
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Abstract

Purpose

The majority of sustainability studies of dairy farms focused on environmental performance and profitability; however, social aspect has been hardly assessed. This study aims to investigate the social impacts of dairy farm via a case study using a social life cycle assessment framework.

Methods

The assessment was carried out applying the social LCA Guideline by UNEP-SETAC. Nineteen suitable social indicators were selected from four stakeholder categories of the guideline. Characterization and normalization were further developed based on data availability. National farm survey data was used as foreground data for farm activities, supplemented with background data from public database and life cycle working environment (LCWE) data by Gabi database. All indicators were divided into three groups: functional unit-related quantitative indicators, non-functional unit-related quantitative indicators and semi-quantitative indicators.

Results and discussion

Irish dairy farming has positive social impacts on value chain actors and society, predominantly positive impacts for local community and generally positive values for workers. The main negative impacts are health and safety issue, equal opportunity for workers, and safe and healthy living conditions for the local community. Possible actions to improve the social performance include introducing more efficient and robotic milk production systems; applying better handling methods and using real time decision support to operational management for emissions reduction.

Conclusions

This study is the first attempt of social LCA in Ireland. It demonstrated a possible method to carry out SLCA for Irish dairy sector. The results identified the positive and negative social hotspot of dairy farm with recommendation for future improvement.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Irish Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Research Stimulus Fund (13/RD/ICT/-AGRI/1) as part of the ERA-net ICT-AGRI call 2.

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  1. UCD School of Biosystems and Food Engineering, Agriculture and Food Science Centre, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland

    Wenhao Chen & Nicholas M. Holden

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  1. Wenhao Chen
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Correspondence to Wenhao Chen.

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Responsible editor: Marzia Traverso

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Chen, W., Holden, N.M. Social life cycle assessment of average Irish dairy farm. Int J Life Cycle Assess 22, 1459–1472 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-016-1250-2

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