Life Cycle Assessment of Chocolate Produced in Ghana

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has lately emerged as a comprehensive tool for environmental management, and is also becoming increasingly important in the development of cleaner production schemes. Conducting an LCA involves collecting data on raw material and energy consumption and on waste emissions to air, water and land. Data is collected for every stage of the life cycle of the product, from mining or cultivation of the raw materials through to processing, transporting, consumption and disposal. Based on a relevant functional unit for the system under study, the collected data is aggregated and modeled into a life cycle inventory, which in turn is classified and characterized to determine the environmental impacts of the entire system. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has standardized the process for conducting LCA in their ISO 14040 series. Many companies have turned to a life-cycle approach in an attempt to properly assess the full environmental impact of their products.

This paper presents an environmental life cycle analysis of chocolate produced in Ghana. The study was conducted in accordance with the international ISO procedural framework for performing and presenting LCA results. The product’s life cycle stages, involving the cocoa supply chain, i.e. cocoa beans production, beans transportation and storage and the industrial processing of beans and chocolate manufacturing stages, were studied. The total environmental impacts associated with chocolate production and the relative contribution of each life cycle stage to the impacts are presented and discussed. The functional unit on which the analysis was based is the production of 1 kg chocolate.