Evaluating the Energy Consumption and Environmental Impacts in Milk Production Chain (Case Study: Kermanshah City of Iran)

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

• Z. Ramedani ¹
• R. Abdi ¹
• M. Omid ²
• M. A. Maysami ¹

¹ Department of Biosystems Engineering, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran

² Department of Biosystems Engineering , University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22067/jam.v8i2.63570

Abstract

Introduction
Life cycle assessment of food products is an appropriate method to understand the energy consumption and production of environmental burdens. Dairy production process has considerable effect on climate change in various ways, and the scale of these effects depends on the practices of dairy industry, dairy farmers and feed growers. This study examined the life cycle of production of dairy products in Kermanshah city. For this purpose, the whole life was divided in two sections: production of raw milk in dairy farm and dairy products in dairy industry. In each section the energy consumption patterns and environmental burdens were evaluated. Based on the results, the consumed energy in dairy farm was 6286.29 MJ for amount of produced milk in month. Also animal feed was the greatest energy consumer with the value of 45.12% that the maximum amount of this value was for concentrate. The minimum consumption of energy was for the machinery with 0.92 MJ in a month. Results of life cycle assessment of dairy products showed that in dairy industry raw milk input causes most of impact categories especially land use, carcinogens and acidification. In dairy farms, concentrate was effective more than 90% in production of impact categories included: land use and carcinogens. Using digesters for production biogas and solar water heaters in dairy farm can decrease fossil recourses.

Materials and Methods
Based on ISO 14044, standards provide an overview of the steps of an LCA: (1) Goal and Scope Definition; (2) Life Cycle Inventory Analysis; (3) Life Cycle Impact Assessment; and (4) Interpretation (ISO, 2006). In this study there were two sub-systems in the production line: dairy farm sub-system (1) and dairy factory sub-system (2). In the sub-system related to the dairy farm, the main product was milk. Determination of inputs and outputs in each sub-system, energy consumption, transportation and emissions to air and water as well as waste treatment are the requirements of LCI. However each of them has several components. These components are different in both sub-systems. All the detailed data about energy equivalent in dairy farm is shown in Table 1. More detailed data about inventories description of two sub-systems are shown in Tables 3 and 4. The SimaPro 7.3.2 was used for analyzing the collected data for calculating environmental burdens (Pré Consultants, 2012).

Results and Discussion
Based on the developed models with SimaPro software for dairy products in the factory, various emissions were generated including emissions into the air, soil and water. The most prevalent emissions are summarized in Table 7. In warm season about half of the milk is processed into drinking yoghurt. Since water is one half of the component of this product so more amount of drinking yoghurt can be achieved with lower energy consumption (about 50%). Furthermore, these results indicated that the magnitude of fossil fuels was much greater than all others. It was followed by land use and respiratory inorganics. The most amount of the consumption of the fossil fuels was the production of energy requirements for heating systems at boilers and tractors in dairy factory and farm, respectively. Also the transportation of raw milk to the dairy industry was another source of the pollution. Also the energy consumption pattern in the dairy farm revealed that the concentrate have high contribution in energy consumption.

Conclusion
Results of the energy consumption pattern showed that the animal feed was the greatest energy consumer with value of 45.12% and followed by electricity (36%). Energy consumption index for the fossil fuel was calculated about 3.8 that is higher than the global index. Production of raw milk in dairy farm is responsible in the production of impact categories especially land use, carcinogenic and acidification with contribution of 97.6%, 78%, and 63%, respectively. Also the amount of CO₂-eq was estimated 2.71 kg for the production of 1kg ECM in cold seasons.

Keywords

• Cradle-to-grave
• Dairy products
• Life cycle assessment
• Midpoint categories

20.1001.1.22286829.1397.8.2.16.0

References

1. Bartl, K., C. Gomez, and T. Nemecek. 2011. Life cycle assessment of milk produced in two smallholder dairy systems in the highlands and the coast of Peru. Journal of Cleaner Production 19: 1494-1505.

2. Boer, D. I. J. M. 2002. Environmental impact assessment of conventional and organic milk production. Livestock Production Science 80: 69-77.

3. Coley, D.A., E. Goodliffe, and J. Macdiarmid. 1998. The embodied energy of food: the role of diet. Energy Policy 26: 455-459.

4. Consoli, F. 1993. Guidelines for life cycle assessment: A code of practice. Sesimbra: SETAC.

5. Daneshi, A., A. Esmaili-sari, M. Daneshi, and H. Baumann. 2014. Greenhouse gas emissions of packaged fluid milk production in Tehran. Journal of Cleaner Production 80: 150-158.

6. Farhangi, Z. 2004. Optimization of energy consumption in milk industry, Iran Energy Efficiency Organization.

7. Gonzalez-Garcia S., E. G. Castanheira, A. Claudia Dias, and L. Arroja. 2013. Using life cycle assessment methodology to assess UHT milk production in Portugal. Science of the Total Environment 442: 225-234.

8. Guinee, J. B. 2004. Hand book on life cycle assessment. Operation guide to ISO standards. Kluwer Academic Publishers: New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow.

9. Hospido A., M. T. Moreira, and G. Feijoo. 2003. Simplified life cycle assessment of galician milk production. International Dairy Journal 13: 783-796.

10. ISO. 2006. ISO 14040. Environmental management. Life cycle assessment-principal and framework. Second edition. Switzerland.

11. Kitani, O. 1999. CIGR handbook of agricultural engineering, Volume 5: Energy and biomass engineering. ASAE Publications, St Joseph, MI.

12. Korsström, E., and M. Lampi. 2001. Best available techniques (BAT) for the Nordic dairy industry, Nordic Council of Ministers. Available at: http://www.ust.is/media/skyrslur2002/BAT_mjolkuridn_2001-586.pdf.

13. Maysami, M. A. 2013. Energy efficiency in dairy cattle farming and related feed production in Iran. Ph.D. thesis in agriculture. Faculty of agriculture and horticulture at Homboldt-University of Berlin.

14. Meul, M., F. Neven, D. Reheul, and G. Hofman. 2007. Energy use efficiency of specialised dairy, arable and pig farms in Flanders. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 119: 135-144.

15. Mogensen L., T. Kristensen, L. T. Nguyen, M. T. Knudsen, and J. E. Hermansen. 2014. Method for calculating carbon footprint of cattle feeds – including contribution from soil carbon changes and use of cattle manure. Journal of Cleaner Production 73: 40-51.

16. Moitzi, G., D. Damm, H. Weingartmann, and J. Boxberger. 2001. Analysis of energy intensity in selected Austrian dairy farms with focus on concentrate level in feeding. Bulletin UASVM Agriculture 67: 194-97.

17. Mousavi-Avval, S. H., Sh. Rafiee, A. Jafari, and A. Mohammadi. 2011. Energy flow modeling and sensitivity analysis of inputs for canola production in Iran. Journal of Cleaner Production 19: 1464-1470.

18. Nabipoor, H., R. Abedi, and R. Loghmanipoor. 2016. Calculation of energy consumption indexes and GHG emissions in dairy farms in Isfahan. The First National Conference on New Findings of Research in Agriculture and Natural Resources, Iran.

19. PRe Consultants. 2003. SimaPro 5 Database Manual.

20. Ramedani, Z., Sh. Rafiee, and M. D. Heidari. 2011. An investigation on energy consumption and sensitivity analysis of soybean production farms. Energy 36: 6340-6344.

21. Rafiee, Sh., B. Khoshnevisan, I. Moahammadi, M. Aghbashlo, H. Mousazadeh, and S. Clark. 2016. Sustainability evaluation of pasteurized milk production with a life cycle

assessment approach: An Iranian case study. Science of the Total Environment 562: 614-627.

22. Sainz, R. D. 2003. Livestock-Environment Initiative Fossil Fuels Component: Framework for Calculation Fossil Fuel Use in Livestock Systems [online] http://www.fao.org.

23. Sefeedpari, P. 2012. Assessment and Optimization of Energy Consumption in Dairy Farm: Energy Efficiency. Iranica Journal of Energy & Environment 3: 213-224.

24. Singh, S., and J. P. Mittal. 1992. Energy in Production Agriculture, Mittal Pub, New Delhi.

25. Soltanali, H., B. Emadi, A. Rohani, M. Khojastepour, and A. Nikkhah. 2015. Life Cycle Assessment modeling of milk production in Iran. Information Processing in Agriculture 2: 101-108.

26. Wells, C. 2001. Total energy indicators of agricultural sustainability: dairy farming case study. MAF Policy, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, PO Box 2526, Wellington.

27. Yilmaz, I., H. Akcaoz, and B. Ozkan. 2005. An analysis of energy use and input costs for cotton productionin Turkey. Renewable Energy 30: 145-155.