Life Cycle Inventory Data for the Italian Olive Oil Supply Chain: How to Ensure Representativeness

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is increasingly used to assess the potential environmental impacts of agri-food products, but practitioners face many problems in identifying and solving various methodological and data availability issues. One of the main critical issues is linked to the lack of reliable site-specific data representing the specificities of the Italian agri-food production processes. These reliable data are still missing in commercial databases, which generally use approximate data or data related to other countries. To reduce this lack, the project “Promoting Agri-Food Sustainability: Development of an Italian Life Cycle Inventory Database of Agri-Food Products (ILCIDAF)” aims to develop a database of life cycle inventory (LCI) for some Italian agri-food products. This chapter reports preliminary results related to the Italian olive oil supply chain showing two different LCI data collection approaches: (i) combining statistical and secondary data and (ii) using primary data collected through surveys. Although differences in data among the proposed approaches exist, the datasets result in a high level of detail that could be used for representing, from macro (country) to micro (organization) levels, the specificities of Italian olive oil production, showing a higher quality of data compared to existing commercial LCI databases.