The assessment of aquaculture sustainability by means of life cycle assessment and other resource accounting methodologies

Abstract

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) allows to quantify the environmental sustainability of a product throughout its complete life cycle, from raw material extraction to the disposal process. In the framework of this doctoral thesis, the analysis has been applied to aquaculture (the farming of fish, molluscs or algae), a sector with a prominent role in the agri-food industry and characterised by a global growing trend. Previous studies proved aquaculture to be more environmentally sustainable than other branches of animal husbandry, including for example the beef industry. However, aquaculture is a vast and heterogeneous sector and LCAs carried out so far show several gaps, both from a methodological point of view and as regards the number of production processes analysed. In this thesis, after a thorough analysis of the existing literature, LCA methodology has been applied to different production processes, focusing on fish species relevant in a national and European context. In one case, the environmental impacts were re-analysed adopting a complementary resource accounting tool, the emergy analysis.