Journal of Cleaner Production 13 (2005) 433e439 www.elsevier.

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Life cycle assessment of beer production in Greece

C. Koroneos), G. Roumbas, Z. Gabari, E. Papagiannidou, N. Moussiopoulos
Laboratory of Heat Transfer and Environmental Engineering, P.O. Box 483, Aristotle University Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece Received 21 April 2003; accepted 10 September 2003

Abstract A case study of beer production in Greece has been performed. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) has been used to identify and quantify the environmental performance of the production and distribution of beer. LCA methodology provides a quantitative basis for assessing potential improvements in environmental performance of a system throughout the life cycle. The system investigated includes raw material acquisition, industrial rening, packaging, transportation, consumption and waste management. Energy use and emissions are quantied and some of the potential environmental eects are assessed. The impact categories most aected by the beer production, are the earth toxicity, or heavy metals, and the category of smog formation. Bottle production, followed by packaging and beer production are found to be the subsystems that account for most of the emissions. Thus, the attempt to minimize the adverse environmental impacts caused by the beer production should focus on the minimization of the emissions produced during these subsystems. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Beer production; Case study; Life cycle analysis; Greece

1. Introduction The food production industry requires large inputs of resources and causes several negative environmental eects. The food production systems are oriented and optimised to satisfy economic demands and the nutritional needs of a rapidly growing world population. Environmental issues, however, have not been given much attention. There are many diculties in conducting life cycle studies of food products. Ideally, a complete study should include agricultural production, industrial rening, storage and distribution, packaging, consumption and waste management, all of which together comprise a large and complex system. The lack of public databases hinders collection of suitable data. Another diculty is that life cycle studies involve many scientic disciplines. Most food life cycle studies performed thus far treat either agricultural production or industrial rening. The aim of this study was to perform a life cycle analysis of beer production in order to identify those
) Corresponding author. Tel.: C30-2310-995068; fax: C30-3210996012. E-mail address: koroneos@aix.meng.auth.gr (C. Koroneos). 0959-6526/$ - see front matter 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2003.09.010

parts of the life cycle that are important to the total environmental impact. The type of beer chosen is lager, which is produced by a Brewery of Northern Greece, located in the industrial zone of Sindos, Thessaloniki. As the work was done in close co-operation with the local producer of lager beer, it was possible to obtain a large amount of site-specic inventory data. The impact assessment made includes the following environmental eects: greenhouse eect, ozone depletion, acidication, eutrophication, smog formation, human toxicity and earth toxicity.

2. Method 2.1. Goal denition The main goal of the case study was to identify key issues associated with the life cycle of beer production, such as:  the steps of the life cycle which give rise to the most signicant environmental input and output ows, that is hot spots,

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Fig. 1. Schematic presentation of the system investigated.

 and to propose improvements and optimise the system. 2.2. The product and the system investigated The product studied was one of the most common brands of beer sold in Greece; it is marketed in 0.5 l green glass bottles. In the present LCA study the cultivation of barley and the production of malt is not

included in the system boundary. The complete system investigated is shown in Fig. 1. The system investigated was divided into ve subsystems. Table 1 shows a summary of the subsystems and the processes they include. The life cycle can be described briey as follows.  Raw material acquisition: The LCA study starts with the transportation of the raw materials to the fermentation factory. Some of the raw materials are

Table 1 The beer production subsystems Subsystem Raw material acquisition Beer production Bottle production Packaging Transportation/Storage/Distribution Processes included Transportation of raw materials to the fermentation factory Barley malt processing and fermentation including liquid waste processing and solid waste management Raw materials acquisition, production process of glass, production of bottles Bottle processing and bottling of beer including liquid waste processing and solid waste management Transportation of the bottle beer to the consumers, recycling of bottles and glass

C. Koroneos et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 13 (2005) 433e439 Table 2 Road transportation data for the raw material acquisition Raw Materials Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) Propane Barley Malt Hop (humulus lupulus) PVPP, siligel Filtration Earth Detergents Bottles Returned Bottles Bottle caps Labels Boxes Pallets Vehicle Type Container Container Container Track Track Track Track Track Track Track Track Track Track Mixed Weight in tn 46 18 22 30 12 30 12 38 38 14 3.5 14 17 Km travelled per trip 7 7 2.650 1.800 3 1.200 3 510 510 510 15 430 90 Average Speed km / h 40 40 60 60 40 80 40 80 80 80 60 80 80

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Quantity transported per trip 30 tn 1.5 tn 17 tn 2.34 tn 3 tn 22 tn 3 tn 48 048 bottles 31 200 bottles 10 400 000 caps 13 000 000 labels 2080 boxes 340 pallets

produced in Greece while others are imported from Western European countries. The transportation to the factory is made mainly by heavy-duty vehicles (containers and tracks), which use diesel fuel. The air emission factors (g pollutant/km) and the fuel consumption are calculated with the use of the Corinair programme [1]. The calculation is based on the type of vehicle and the average speed of the vehicle. The pollutants that are calculated were CO, NOx, VOC, PM, CO2, and SO2. The emissions and the fuel consumption from road transportation are then calculated based on the km travelled per

trip. Table 2 presents the data from road transportation.  Beer production: The main ingredient for the production of beer is water and barley malt. To produce 1 litre of beer, the brewery will consume 5.25 litres of water, a number is close to the 7 litres reported in the literature [2]. The production of beer is a batch process and 12,000 kg of barley malt are processed in each batch. Fig. 2 shows the basic input and outputs in the beer production subsystem.  Bottle production: The bottle production was investigated and analysed. The bottles are produced mainly

Fig. 2. Input and outputs in the beer production subsystem for one batch.

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Table 3 Inputs for the production of 1000 kg glass including the energy for the shaping of the bottle Raw Materials Scrap Glass Limestone Water Halite Chromium kg / 1,000 kg produced glass 1.050 5.36 0.06 6.71 0.67 Energy Electricity Diesel Natural Gas Heating Oil Lignite Propane Energy for the production of 1,000 kg glass in MJ 2500 150 590 7780 50 100

from recycled glass. Table 3 summarises the basic inputs for the production of bottle glass.  Packaging and bottling: The bottling of one batch requires 140,376 bottles (0.546 kg of glass per bottle) including losses (about 3% of which is returned to the bottle producer as scrap glass). Of these bottles, about 51% is from returned bottles to the factory and the rest come from the bottle producer. The

total bottled beer produced is about 136,600 bottles. Fig. 3 shows the basic inputs and outputs from the packaging process.  Transportation/Storage/Distribution: The LCA study was completed with the transportation and distribution of the produced beer to the consumers. Also the distribution of solid wastes and recyclable materials was taken into account. Again programme

Fig. 3. Input and outputs in the packaging subsystem for one batch.

C. Koroneos et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 13 (2005) 433e439 Table 4 Road transportation data for the distribution Outputs Scrap glass paper Bottle caps Boxes Pallets Bottled Beer Solid waste for cattle food Trub for processing Distribution of beer Vehicle type Track Track Track Track Track Track Track Container Track Combined weight of vehicle in tn 35 11.5 18.6 (10 clean weight) 38 19.5 38 9 10 4 km per trip 170 3 5 510 5 510 20 3 40 Average speed km/h 80 40 40 80 40 80 40 40 40

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Quantity transported 18 tn 3 tn 50 kg 2500 boxes 135 pallets 31 200 bottles 6 tn 7000 lt 100 boxes

Corinair [1] was used in order to calculate the emissions. In Table 4 the data from road transportation are presented.

2.3. The functional unit The functional unit is one bottle of beer (combined weight of beer and glass 1.066 kg), which is dened as:  0.52 l of beer (520 g of beer) and  0.546 kg of green glass.

3. Results The use of primary energy and potential contributions to global warming, ozone depletion, acidication, eutrophication (nitrication), photo-oxidant formation, human toxicity and ecotoxicity, at subsystem level, are presented in the following paragraphs. 3.1. Energy The distribution of energy and the use of energy sources per subsystem are shown in Figs. 4 and 5 respectively. The distribution of energy per type of energy is shown in Fig. 6.

It is clear that the bottle production is the greatest energy consumer in beer production cycle (85%). In the bottle production subsystem the main energy input comes form diesel fuel (71%) followed by electricity (21.4%) and natural gas (5.3%). Diesel fuel is the main energy source used in the beer production system (67.3%) followed by electricity (20.7%) and heavy fuel oil (HFO 6.4%). Carbon intensity is dened as the kilograms of equivalent CO2 (Table 5, see section 3.2) produced from a process or from the production cycle of a product per unit of energy consumed by the process or the production cycle. Carbon intensity is an indicator of the environmental and the energetic eciency of the process or the production cycle of a product. High carbon intensity values mean low energy eciency or use of low-grade fuels or both. In Fig. 7 the carbon intensity expressed as kgCO2eq/kWh per subsystem is shown. It can be seen that beer production and raw material acquisition subsystems have greater carbon intensity than bottle production, packaging and transportation/ storage/distribution subsystems. The carbon intensity of raw material acquisition and of transportation/storage/ distribution depends on the km travelled (Tables 2 and 4). The high value of raw material acquisition is due to km travelled. The high value of beer production

Fig. 4. The distribution of energy in the beer production system.

Fig. 5. The use of energy in the beer production system.

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subsystem is due to the use of low grade fuel (Heavy Fuel Oil) (Fig. 5). 3.2. Environmental eects The emissions of the system have been grouped into impacts (characterisation step) based on the Sima-Pro method [3,4]. The characterisation results are shown in Table 5, while Fig. 8 shows the contribution of each subsystem to each impact category. From Fig. 8 it can be seen that the bottle production subsystem is the major contributor to global warming eect as expected because Diesel is the major energy source. Normalization reveals which eects are large, and which eects are small, in relative terms. It says nothing of the relative importance of these eects. Valuation factors are used for this purpose. The evaluation of the environmental score of each eect is calculated based on the formula: Environmental score Z Characterised value ! Normalisation ! Weighting factor Due to lack of such factors for Greece, Holland factors have been used for the evaluation process. These factors are shown in Table 6 [4]. The normalization results (Characterised value ! Normalisation factor) are shown in Fig. 9, while Fig. 10 presents the evaluation results (environmental score). From Figs. 9 and 10 it can be seen that the categories most aected by the beer production are the earth toxicity and the smog formation. The total environmental scores of each subsystem are shown in Fig. 11 and the contribution of the environmental eect to the environmental score of each subsystem is given in Fig. 12. It is clear that bottle production & packaging has the largest environmental scores that result from emissions that contribute to earth toxicity and photochemical smog.

Fig. 6. Distribution of energy per type of energy.

Table 5 Characterization results per functional unit Category Greenhouse Eect Ozone Depletion Eutrophication Acidication Smog formation Solid wastes Human toxicity Earth toxicity Characterized value 392.46 0.00234 0.40895 0.00015 21.413 557.9 6.724E-05 0.05161 Unit kg kg kg kg kg kg kg kg CO2-eq CFC11-eq PO4-eq SO2-eq C2H4-eq B(a)P Pb

Fig. 7. Carbon intensity expressed as kgCO2eq/kWh per subsystem.

Fig. 8. Characterisation results.

C. Koroneos et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 13 (2005) 433e439 Table 6 Normalization and weighting factors Category Greenhouse Eect Ozone Depletion Eutrophication Acidication Smog formation Solid wastes Human toxicity Earth toxicity Normalized factor 0.0000742 1.24 0.0262 0.00888 0.03065 0 106 17.8 Weighting factor 2.5 100 5 10 3.75 0 10 5

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Fig. 12. Contribution of the each impact category to the environmental score of each subsystem.

4. Conclusions The results presented illustrate the complexity in a scientic evaluation of a products environmental performance; the results of the energy analysis do not always point in the same direction as those of the impact assessment. From the results obtained, it can be seen that for many of the impact categories, bottle production followed by packaging and beer production are the subsystems that contribute mostly to the adverse environmental impacts of the beer production. Thus, the attempt to minimize the adverse environmental impacts caused by the beer production should focus on the minimization of the emissions produced during these subsystems. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank deeply the Brewery of Northern Greece, located in the industrial zone of Sindos, Thessaloniki, for the site-specic data it provided, and for answering patiently all of the questions.
Fig. 10. Evaluation results per functional unit.

Fig. 9. Normalization results per functional unit.

References
[1] COPERT IIdComputer programme to calculate emissions from road transport. European Environment AgencydEuropean Topic Center on Air Emissions, November 1997. [2] Pauli G. Zero emissions: the ultimate goal of cleaner production. J Clean Prod 1997;5(1-2):109e13. [3] Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape (SAEFL). Life cycle inventories for packagings, Vols. IeII. Berne; 1998. [4] SimaPro. Method: Eco-Indicator 95, Europe g. PRe Consultants BV. Amersfoort, The Netherlands, http://www.simapro.com. Christopher J. Koroneos is a special Scientist at the Laboratory of Heat Transfer and Environmental Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. He is teaching at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He was previously teaching at Columbia University in New York, where he also received his BS, MS and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering.

Fig. 11. Environmental scores of each subsystem per functional unit.