Abstract
Aim: Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an ISO-standardized analytical tool developed to evaluate environmental performance of products and processes. The aquaculture industry is one of the largest and fast-growing industries in the agricultural sector because of its health benefits. However, this growth comes with fuel combustion technologies and other operations. Therefore, quantifying the level of impact caused by these processes is imperative. The study was aimed at carrying out an LCA for the production and processing of smoked fish using the University of Ibadan Fish Farm as a case study to identify environmentally detrimental production and processing hotspots.
Methods: The approach employed for this study is the cradle-to-gate approach, which involves the operations from breeding/hatching to the packaging of smoked fish. Relevant data was obtained through site visitation and physical interviews. The data on energy and material resources used in the processes were modeled on GaBi9 (Holistic Balancing) software. The tool used to analyze the life cycle inventories of smoked fish production is TRACI (Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and other Environmental Impacts) midpoint assessment and modeling was for 1kg functional unit of smoked fish. Four scenarios were drawn out for assessing the impact by varying the energy and material resources.
Results: The total energy used in the smoking kiln for the one month under study was 35,660.16MJ. Six impact categories were measured for all four scenarios and the following categories had the highest impact in order of ascension; Global Warming Potential (GWP) (0.438, 0.243, 0.609, 0.624) kg CO2-Eqiv., Smog Air (0.0702, 0.288, 0.478, 0.277) kg O3-Equiv., Human Health Criteria Air (4.173e-03, 3.502e-04, 1.503e-03, 3.443e-03) kg PM10-Equiv. and Acidification Potential (AP) (2.19e-04, 2.88e-04, 3.37e-04, 5.68e-04) kg SO2-Equiv. The unit process with the highest impact on the environment for all four scenarios is the fish smoking process. Transportation and burning of charcoal also contributed to the emission of gases such as CO2, CO, CH4, N2O, SO2, NOx, VOCs, PMs, etc. Also, the use of Polyethylene (PE) and Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE) plastics as packaging materials contribute to the release of heavy metals such; Cr, Cd, Ar, Zn, Cu, Pb, etc. into the environment for all four scenarios.
Conclusion: The fish smoking process has the highest impact on the environment for all four scenarios. However other unit processes also have contributory effect. At the end of the study, it was recommended that renewable energy sources as well as energy from bio-waste should be explored for the smoking kilns to achieve cleaner production.
Key words: Keyword: smoked fish production and processing, life cycle assessment, global warming, acidification potential, smog air, environmental impact.
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