Life-Cycle Assessment of Environmental Effects on Rapeseed Production

Abstract

In recent years, increasing the awareness on the environmental problems, especially global warming, has increase the concerns about the impact of emissions on the global climate. The current study was conducted to evaluate and analyze the environmental effects of rapeseed production in the form of life cycle using SimaPro software with the aim concentration on climate changes and impact of acidification. In order to perform the experiments, 1 tone rapeseed was used as operational unit. The required data was collected from 30 farms in Izeh city. Ten environmental indexes including depletion of groundwater resources, potential to acidification, potential to eutrophication, potential to global warming, ozone depletion potential, human toxicity potential, potential to toxicity of fresh water and marine fish, potential to environmental toxicity, potential to photochemical oxidation were investigated in this research. Results showed that the amount of greenhouse emissions for rapeseed was equal to 112.73 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. It was also revealed that chemical fertilizer had the highest share among the evaluated inputs within the life cycle. Results obtained in this survey indicated that management of nutrients and pesticides can be considered as a concentration point for optimizing the environmental influences of rapeseed production in the related region.