Accounting for co-product use to capture the indirect effects of crop diversification with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

Problem

Evaluating whether diversified cropping systems delivering multiple co-products are more sustainable than the specialised ones (reference) they replace requires looking at the use of all co-products along the value chain to the final user.

Solution

Substitutional LCA consists of expanding the boundaries of the system under study to include co-product use according to the market. This ensures comparable results and highlights potential trade-offs between environmental impacts.