The European pork sector is a very competitive one in the sense that the consumer demand within EU as well as outside EU very much depends on costs of pork. It is immediately clear that the costs of the final product depends on the sum of costs throughout the food chain - from feed production to pig rearing and meat processing – and the common language throughout the chain is the EURO’s when a pig, a carcass, or a piece of meat is transferred to one stage from another.

Environmental impact
However price is not the only parameter that determines the consumer’s in- The environmental profile of the European pork sector and how to model it terest in pork. Besides product quality and animal welfare also the environmental load of the product has gained increased attention. At present in particular the impact of meat production/consumption on the global warming has a considerable interest among consumers and consequently among actors in the food chain. This is not a coincidence. It is estimated that approximately 25% of the human impact on global warming is related to food consumption, and in a recent work it was found that the meat and dairy consumption alone accounted for 14% of the global warming effects of the total economic activities in EU. In the same way the meat and dairy consumption was responsible for 25% of the total acidification and 47% of the total aquatic eutropfication within EU. Thus meat consumption is a determining factor in the overall environmental impact of our activities, and this highlights the importance of taking these aspects into account in all decisions in the food chain and in the consumption pattern of the consumers.

LCA approach
It is, however, a prerequisite for taking such aspects into consideration that a common language exists among actors in the chain, just like the EURO is regarding financial matters, and that the environmental load can be summed up along the food chain. The framework for such an environmental assessment and communication is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. This is very well developed in purely industrial production, but less developed within food and farming, where a considerable part of the load is related to the farming activities. The LCA approach allows the formation of environmental indicators that integrates emissions of different substances and places in the chain in a logic way, i.e. the contribution to global warming will be a sum of the impacts coming from emissions of CO2 (related to i.e burning of fossil fuels used for transport) plus emissions of methane (originating from manure management) and emission of laughing gas (coming from i.e fertilizer use).

In Q-PorkChains we develop this methodology in evaluating the environmental profile of different pork products originating from different pork Pig production chains and we investigate how this information can be integrated in the decision- making processes along with other decisions regarding quality and financial management.

At present we have performed a preliminarily assessment of the environmental profile of the European pork sector including an identification of which part of the pork chain, the highest load of different environmental impacts occurs under different circumstances. In this preliminary work we used production of sausages as a very simplified example and thus considered the processes involved from feed production, farming, slaughtering, processing and distribution, as detailed in the figure above.

The preliminary results show that the total contribution from the production of 1 kg pork product was for global warming 5.3-5.7 kg CO2 equivalents, for eutrophication 268-338 g NO3 equivalents and for fossil energy use 29.8-30.8 MJ. Benchmark values for global warming are for many vegetables less than 0.3 kg CO2 per kg product, which illustrates the importance within the pork sector to address this question.

While acidification and eutrophication is mostly related to the pig farming, pork processing makes its largest contributions to fossil energy use and Global Warming Potential. In contrast, the slaughtering process itself has negligible effects on all impact categories. The coming work will include an assessment of how the environmental load can be reduced - based on cross country information on environmental impact of pig farms as well as routes and organization of the pork chain in the steps after the pig farm. At present data collection takes place for several pig production systems within a number of countries.