The second principle, multi-impact approach, means to quantify all relevant potential environmental impacts caused by a study object. Nowadays the focus is on climate impacts as an urgent environmental problem to solve. However, there are also other environmental impacts that can be quantified with the LCA method, such as a water footprint or the eutrophication potential (ie the over-fertilisation of aquatic or terrestrial systems).

Besides climate change especially eutrophication, the loss of biodiversity or land transformation are urgent environmental topics to address too, as we are already overshooting these boundaries on a global scale which increases the “risk of large-scale abrupt or irreversible environmental changes” (SRI, 2022). This enables to address potential burden shifts which can easily be overseen when only focusing on for example the carbon footprint.

At Skretting we acknowledge these planetary boundaries. Carbon footprinting is the main, also politically most urgent topic over the coming years and thus, we’re also focusing on this impact category. Still, we are trying to consider also other environmental impacts when thinking of carbon reduction strategies. The implementation of LCA-based metrics into our systems helps us on this learning journey.

In addition, we also implemented the footprint data into our formulation systems which helps us:

1. Calculate feed footprints automatically.
2. Understand how different formulation choices impact this footprint on product level.
3. Actively formulate products to a lower footprint and determine the resulting impact on ingredient composition and price.

Overall, this solution helps us tremendously to eco-design our feed in future.

The key challenges we are currently facing and going to address throughout 2022 and in the future is that information on sourcing countries is currently not automatically tracked in our procurement system.
Especially for vegetable ingredients, the footprints may be significantly different depending on the regions they are sourced from. Hence, implementing this information into the procurement systems will increase the accuracy of the footprint dashboard greatly as it will allow us to calculate with countryor region-specific LCA metrics, which we already have available for many ingredients in our internal database. Another challenge is the dependency on mostly secondary data, as quality-assured primary data from producers is still rare (see next section on how we are planning to address this).

This shows that accurate footprint values can be limited by either (LCA) data availability and quality on the one side, but also by supply chain transparency and information on the other. Implementing LCA has already helped us to improve both.