LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT (LCA) ON EUROPEAN SKIMMED MILK POWDER PROCESSING PRODUCTION PLANT

The dairy industry consists one of the most energy intensive food industries, with milk powder production being the most energy consuming process. The aim of this work is to present the state of the art skimmed milk powder production processing chain in order to identify the processes with high environmental and energy impact. A life cycle assessment (LCA) has been performed to analyse the environmental footprint and energy balance derived from the skimmed milk powder (medium heat) production on the post-harvest chain. Therefore, a comparative gate to gate LCA was performed within the boundaries of the processing plant (i.e. standardization/separation, homogenization, pasteurization, evaporation, spray drying). In this study, two scenarios were evaluated on their environmental performance: a) the conventional production of skimmed milk powder (SMP) with the inclusion of Reverse Osmosis (Scenario 1) and b) the production of SMP exclusion of Reverse Osmosis (Scenario 2). The standard framework of LCA was followed according to the ISO 14044, which is also in line with the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook. LCA study was performed on Gabi 6 software with databases from within the food industry. Inventory data were collected from the industry and completed using the literature and databases, impact categories were evaluated adopting a CML method with the energy analysis carried out based on the cumulative energy demand (CED).