New research includes plastic emission in LCA for seafood products

The scientific Article “Expanding life cycle impact assessment to account for marine plastic emissions: a case study for the fishing industry" has just been published in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).

This study is an international collaboration between researchers collaborating in the MarILCA project (under the UN's life cycle initiative) including the Dsolve project Research Area 5 researchers, CeciliaAskham, Mafalda Silva and Valentina Pauna. The paper includes plastic emissions, such as gear loss and wear and tear, in the emissions data (life cycle inventory) and tests currently available factors for plastic pollution impacts (characterisation factors) to identify their importance for ecosystem quality damage in life cycle impact assessment calculations.  

The work focused on two seafood product cases, both delivered to Norwegian customers: (1) 1 tonne of packaged anchoveta fishmeal supplied to a Norwegian fish farm, and (2) 1 tonne of packaged cod supplied to Norwegian household consumers. Both cases included plastic losses in the whole value chains, also for the packaging used. The paper includes many interesting results; some of the main findings were that the fishing stage dominates the ecosystem quality damage results for both systems. Production of antifouling coating was also found to be important for cod fished with gillnets, whereas entanglement results completely dominate the picture for anchoveta, see link for more of the results found.

Important results

Including the impacts associated with plastic emissions is important in LCAs where plastic materials or products are used. Without the inclusion of the plastic impacts, LCAs will not capture all of the impacts that plastics can have on the ecosystem. In the future, conducting research on the timescale that lost fishing gear continues to cause harm is very important, since it can continue to entangle organisms, and contribute to the overall ecosystem damage caused by fishing.

- The work in this paper is very important for Dsolve, as we implement emerging methods for accounting for the effects of conventional plastic lost from fishing into the environment, says Cecilia Askam, leader of Research Area 5 on sustainability of bio-based, biodegradable, and non-degradable plastics for fishing gear and aquaculture equipment, in Dsolve.

-   We have tested the emerging methods and highlighted data gaps when trying to include plastic lost to the environment in an LCA that includes the whole value chain of a product. The Dsolve project case in this paper focuses on cod fished using gillnets and provides a baseline for this type of fishery that can be used to compare the biodegradable plastic solutions developed in the Dsolve project, explains Askham.

If the biodegradable solutions have a higher impact on the environment than conventional solutions, then this is vital feedback for the Dsolve materials development work. Current LCA methodology has large gaps when it comes to including plastic losses to the environment in LCA. The Dsolve project also feeds into international methodology development, both by providing real-life case studies and providing empirical data from field tests that can be used to improve the impact assessment models used in LCA.

 - This methodological development then feeds back into what we can include in our research in the Dsolve project. It is very exciting to be working with this challenging, international, interdisciplinary research problem, says Askham.