Hort Innovation and Lifecycles, Joint Media Release, 19 September 2024

In a mission to develop a long-term sustainability program for the Rubus Berry industry, Hort Innovation and Lifecycles are embarking on a Life cycle assessment (LCA) project aimed at generating comprehensive information and metrics about the environmental performance of raspberry and blackberry production in Australia.

Acknowledging the growing demand from both government bodies and industry stakeholders for heightened transparency on environmental issues, the project aims to generate information that can inform a sustainability strategy and enable clear communication of the industry’s environmental credentials to consumers and regulators.

The primary objective of the LCA study is to generate baseline and benchmark metrics for the rubus industry’s carbon footprint and water footprint. This will give growers and industry associations an understanding of the scale, significance, and sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and potential water use impacts. By doing so, the industry can identify potential risks, address data gaps, explore opportunities for reducing environmental footprints, and construct positive environmental narratives for the industry. This can feed into a sustainability strategy, via a workshop to be conducted as part of the project.

The LCA studies will be conducted at two scales – for individual businesses and at industry-scale. The individual business case studies will take a deep dive at different production typologies and consider feasible environmental improvement initiatives. The industry-scale LCA will have a broader perspective by collecting a larger sample of data by survey to generate environmental metrics representing industry averages, a baseline and benchmarks.

In essence, the project equips the rubus berry industry with information, metrics and resources for informing their sustainability strategy and decision-making about environmental improvements, and helping growers respond to future requests from supply chain partners for information about environmental credentials.

This project has been funded by Hort Innovation, using the raspberry and blackberry research and development levy and contributions from the Australian Government. Hort Innovation is the grower-owned, not-for-profit research and development corporation for Australian horticulture. For more information on the fund and strategic levy investment visit horticulture.com.au or the project report here.  

If you’d be interested in participating in the project by contributing data to the industry sample, contact the project team lead.
Marguerite Renouf, Senior LCA Scientist marguerite@lifecycles.com.au

About Lifecycles:
Lifecycles is Australia’s most experienced provider of LCA, circular economy and sustainability consulting, tool development, data sets and training. Lifecycles has developed much of Australia’s life cycle inventory (LCI) data, which is used around the world by LCA professionals and researchers. The analysis of agricultural and food production systems is a particular speciality, having developed much of the agriculture LCI data in the AusLCI database and conducting update to the national food waste baseline. https://www.lifecycles.com.au/