Life cycle assessment of germinated oil palm seeds production and oil palm seedling production employing an open-source software
1.1. Abstract
Palm oil sustainability is very dependent on identifying the impacts from the activities of the smallholder farmers, as smallholder farmers the major producers of the world’s palm oil. Employing a scientifically acceptable and free cost tool will assist the smallholders to reduce environmental impact from their activities. This paper aims to implement the life cycle assessment (LCA) of the production of the germinated oil palm seeds, and the production of oil palm seedling using an open-source LCA package, namely OpenLCA software. The life cycle inventory data was obtained from the literature review and newest version of Ecoinvent (Version 3.2). The system boundary included activities in germinated oil palm seeds production unit and production of the seedling. ReCiPe Midpoint with Hierarchist perspective was used as an indicator in the life cycle impact assessment. The weighted results showed that for production 1000 germinated oil palm seeds, the major impact categories was the marine ecotoxicity. However, in the production oil palm seedling, marine ecotoxicity was the major impact category. The production of 1000 germinated oil palm seeds generated 1.03 kg CO2 eq while the production of a single oil palm seedling generated 1.42*10-2 kg CO2 eq. The usages of diesel and electricity were significant while the transportation had minimum impact on both production units. The environmental impact can be considered as insignificant. The results are different from the previous case studies. This is due to the employment of recently updated Ecoinvent database.
Keywords: open-source software, life cycle assessment (LCA), palm oil seeds, palm oil seedling, palm oil biodiesel.
1.2. Introduction
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool used to evaluate the environmental impacts associated with a product, process or activity by identifying and quantifying energy and materials used as well as waste released into the environment (ISO 14044 2006). Implementing LCA assists the decision maker in mitigating the environmental impact of their products. All full LCAs should cover the entire life cycle of the product, process or activity as well encompassing extraction and processing of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation and distribution, use, reuse, maintenance, recycling and final disposal (SETAC 1993).
Malaysia is the world’s second largest oil palm producer after Indonesia. The planted area for oil palm in Malaysia is 5.6 million ha. Oil palm industry in 2016 is expected to contribute RM 69 billion (USD 16 billion) to the country, which accounts for 5-6 % of Malaysia’s gross domestic product (GDP) (Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) statistics 2015). Smallholder farmers play a crucial role in the palm oil industry. In 2015, they produced around 40% of the world’s palm oil (RSPO 2015). Developing open-source tools will assist smallholder farmers to mitigate the environmental impact and will promote the suitability of palm oil.
The oil palm biodiesel production system is shown in Fig. 1. This study concentrates only the first two subsystems, production of the germinated oil palm seeds and the production of the seedling in the nursery. The first subsystem of the oil palm supply chain is the production of germinated oil palm seeds. This subsystem allows closer supervision over controlled area during the first 10 to 12 months of oil palm seeds. The well management and practices in the nursery will lead to increase in the production of the oil palm trees.
Fresh fruit bunches (FFB) is first brought from the plantation to the seed production unit. After recording the weight, the fruit bunch chopped with an axe on a table to separate the stall from the spikelets. After retting the fruits in trays for around 3-5 days to allow them to detach, the isolation and separation of normal fruits from parthenocarpics carried out. An electrical motor driven depericarper usually will be used to separate the mesocarp from the seeds. Those seeds are soaked to ensure the optimal moisture content. After they are washed with a suitable detergent to remove the mesocarp oil from their surface before fungicide treatment start which involved vacuum infiltration, which is kill fungal spores inside the shell, on the kernel surface, as well as on the outside of the seed. It is recommended that this treatment should become routine whenever seed shipped from one area to another (Flood et al. 1994). To break the dormancy of oil palm seeds for germination the heat treatment is used (Flood et al. 1990). Finally, only typical and good condition seeds are packed and transferred to the seedling production unit (Corley and Tinker 2003).
There are two common methods for the oil palm nursery procedure. The first one is the single stage and the second the double stage. The main benefit of the single-stage nursery is to reduce the overall time in the nursery by about 2 months, whereby the seedling is raised up directly into big polythene bags until they are ready for transplanting on the main plantation field. However, the most practiced method is the double-stage nursery system. In the double-stage, the seedlings are sown in small polybags, and this stage is usually called pre-nursery (Rankine and Fairhurst 1994). Those seedlings are kept under protective sunlight or shade or for 3-4 months. In the second stage, which is called the main nursery, the seedlings are transplanted to larger polybags (30-38 cm) for about 12-14 months (Singh et al. 1999). In the main nursery, the seedlings are raised under direct sunlight. When the seedlings are ready, they are transplanted to plantation area. The number of germinated oil palm seeds in 2015 was around 56 million germinated seed ((MPOB) statistics 2016).
A study on LCA production of germinated oil palm seed and production of oil palm seedling were done and published (Muhamad et al. 2010; Muhamad et al. 2014). Those researches were done using paid software, SimaPro version 7.1. In this study, we used an open-source software, OpenLCA 1.5 (GreenDeltaTC 2015). The OpenLCA is an open-source software that is user-friendly and it allows the user to determine all the stages associated to LCA (Ormazabal et al. 2014). This will improve LCA techniques and life cycle assessment inventory (LCI) database of the oil palm.
Furthermore, LCA methodology used in those studies was Ecoindicator 99 but in our study, ReCiPe Midpoint was used, The ReCiPe Midpoint more supportive for the decision maker (Goedkoop et al. 2013). Hence, the ReCiPe Midpoint shows more complete results while Ecoindicator 99 results are brief (Dong and Ng 2014). ReCiPe covered approximately 3000 substances whereas Ecoindicator covered only approximately 391 substances (Burchart-Korol 2013; Dong and Ng 2014; Owsianiak et al. 2014; Kägi et al. 2016; Steubing et al. 2016). The OpenLCA was used by (Reeb et al. 2014) but they used the old version of Ecoinvent and TRACI as impact assessment which included nine impact categories. Moreover, their study did not include the production germinated oil palm seed. In our present study, we analysed both the production of the germinated oil palm seeds and the production of oil palm seedling using the recent version of Ecoinvent (version 3.2). The results are different from the earlier papers (Muhamad et al. 2010; Choo et al. 2011; Muhamad et al. 2014), and this due to the usage of different methodology and the updated database (Wernet et al. 2016). To our best knowledge, this the first paper which reports the environmental impacts of both the production of the germinated oil palm seeds and the production of oil palm seedling using recent Ecoinvent database (version 3.2) of OpenLCA.
1.3. Materials and methods
1.3.1. Objectives
There are two main objectives of this LCA study and they are as follows:
• To implement the LCA for the production of the germinated oil palm seeds and production oil palm seedling using an open-source LCA software package. This eventually leads to enhance the experience of the LCA framework for all oil palm supply chain.
•To quantify and evaluate environmental impacts associated with the production of germinated oil palm seeds and the production of palm oil seedling using midpoint approaches.
1.3.2. Functional unit
The functional unit for the first subsystem, namely the production of the germinated oil palm seeds selected was 1000 germinated oil palm seeds. For the second subsystem, namely the production of seedling a single oil palm seedling was used as a functional unit.
1.3.3. Allocation of co-products
No allocation needed because of the simplicity of the production system.
1.3.4. System boundary
The first subsystem of this study is a cradle-to-gate system boundary, starting from transferring of the with the transportation of the FFB from mother oil palm to the seed production unit, seed germination process, management of germinated oil palm seeds and delivery to the nursery. Fig. 2 exposes the subsystem boundary for the production of the germinated oil palm seeds.
The second subsystem of this study is also a cradle-to-gate system boundary, beginning with the transportation of the germinated oil palm seeds to the nursery and ending with the transportation of 12-month-old seedlings in big polybags to the plantation. Fig. 3 illustrates the subsystem boundary for the production of the production of oil palm seedling.
In both of the subsystems, all processes are considered relevant unless excluded based on the exclusion criteria. Tables 1 and 2 show the system boundaries of this study.
Capital equipment, building and machinery, road lighting, workers and the production of topsoil were excluded in this assessment.
1.3.5. Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA)
The system boundary for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) starts from the transfer of FFB from mother palms to the seed production unit until transplanted seedling to the plantation area. OpenLCA version 1.4 was used to simulate and modelling the environmental impact. Among the available LCA methodologies, the methodology used was in this study ReCiPe Midpoint with Hierarchist perspective. The eighteen impact categories was considered in the methodology : agricultural land occupation (unit: m2*a ), climate Change (unit: kg CO2 eq), fossil depletion (unit: kg oil eq), freshwater ecotoxicity (unit: kg 1,4-DB eq ), freshwater eutrophication (unit: kg P eq), human toxicity (unit: kg 1,4-DB eq), ionising radiation (unit: kg U235 eq), marine ecotoxicity (unit: kg 1,4-DB eq), marine eutrophication (unit: kg N eq), metal depletion (unit: kg Fe eq), natural land transformation (unit: m2), ozone depletion (unit: kg CFC-11 eq), particulate matter formation (unit: kg PM10 eq), photochemical oxidant formation (unit: kg NMVOC), terrestrial acidification (unit: kg SO2 eq), terrestrial ecotoxicity (unit: kg 1,4-DB eq), urban land occupation (unit: m2*a), water depletion (unit: m3). The normalized factors were used in this study were based on world population (ReCiPe Midpoint (H) V1.11 / World ReCiPe H / normalization), due to the absence and difficulty in defining the normalized factors for Malaysia specifically.
1.4. Results and discussion
1.4.1. Life cycle inventory
Because of the limitation on the number of the LCA studies on the production of oil palm seeds and the production of oil palm seedling, we have chosen two main LCA studies to obtain the LCI (Muhamad et al. 2010; Muhamad et al. 2014). The LCI data for those two LCA case studies were reviewed by the LCA Technical Working Group, the LCA Technical Committee and the National Committee on LCA Studies for the Oil Palm Industry, which comprised representatives of the stakeholders, from the Scientific and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia (SIRIM), and the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) LCA team. Thus, the LCI data can be considered accurate and precise data.
However, for those data, which were not available, Ecoinvent version 3.2 LCI database was used (Weidema et al. 2013). Since the market activities reduce the uncertainty, it is used whenever it is available (Weidema et al. 2013). The market activities transfer the intermediate exchange from one transforming activity to another transforming activity that consumes this intermediate exchange as an input (Weidema et al. 2013). Tables 3 and 4 show the LCI for both subsystems.
1.4.2. Production of the germinated oil palm seeds
Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) for the production of 1000 germinated oil palm seeds is shown in Table 5. Fig. 4 presents the weighted results for production of 1000 germinated oil palm seeds. Based on the normalization and weighing, the major impact category was the marine ecotoxicity which accounted to around 0.0197 kg 1,4-dichlorobenzene equivalent (1,4-DB eq). The copper ion, with its impact on the long-term of the ground water, is the major contributor in this impact category. However, electricity consumption was the primary cause of this impact; it accounted around 65%. The greenhouse gas (GHG) emitted was 1.03 kg CO2 eq and the main source of this emission was electricity usage. The carbon dioxide with low population density was the most emitted GHG. In addition, electricity consumption has a considerable influence on the climate change, freshwater ecotoxicity, freshwater eutrophication, human toxicity, marine ecotoxicity, particulate matter formation, photochemical oxidant formation, urban land occupation, and water depletion. Production of germinated oil palm seeds caused a very minimum impact of the water depletion.
According to our finding, the application of the alcohol has a high impact on the terrestrial ecotoxicity it was equal to 1.70*10-4 kg 1,4-DB eq. Moreover, the fungicides, such as benomyl and thiram, have a considerable impact on the marine eutrophication, metal depletion, particulate matter formation, terrestrial acidification and human toxicity, especially the metal depletion. Transportation was the lowest activity in term of the environmental impact, due to the low distance. Fig. 5 exposes the characterization results for the production of 1000 germinated oil palm seeds. The results of this study were more accurate, especially in terms of in electricity impacts. This because Ecoinvent database version 3.2 was used (Steubing et al. 2016; Treyer and Bauer 2016).
1.4.3. Production of the production of oil palm seedling
Table 6 shows the LCIA for the production of one oil palm seedling. The average GHG emission in the world was around 0.118 kg CO2 eq (Weidema et al. 2013). But, in our case, it was significantly lower around at 0.0142 kg CO2 eq. The result showed that polyethene bags (polybags) caused considerable impacts from this emission; around 42% of the total GHG. The transportation in this subsystem caused very minimum emissions. The normalization and the weighing results indicated that the marine ecotoxicity was the major impact category, as shown in Fig. 6. However, normalization showed that the lowest impact category was the water depletion. Reduction in the usage of the electricity will directly result in a greater reduction of the environmental impact, especially freshwater ecotoxicity and climate change. Fig. 7 illustrates the characterized results for the single oil palm oil seedling.
1.5. Conclusion
This study implemented the LCA of the production of germinated oil palm seeds and the production of the oil palm seedling using an open-source software (OpenLCA V1.4). Employing the concept of the usage of open-source software will allow the smallholder farmers to identify the environmental impacts from their activities with a minimum cost and easier scheme to share the information. Eventually, this will improve the sustainability of palm oil biodiesel industry in Malaysia.
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List of Tables
- Table 1 System boundary (included criteria) (Muhamad et al. 2010; Muhamad et al. 2014) 3
- Table 2 System boundary (excluded criteria) (Muhamad et al. 2010; Muhamad et al. 2014) 4
- Table 3 LCI for production of 1000 germinated oil palm seeds(Muhamad et al. 2014) 5
- Table 4 LCI for production one oil palm seedling (Muhamad et al. 2010) 6
- Table 5 LCIA Results of production 1000 germinated seeds 7
- Table 6 LCIA Results of production of a single seedling 8
Production of oil palm germinated seeds / Production of oil palm seedling
Processing Category / Processing category
- Manufacturing of fungicides inputs e.g. benomyl and thiram Manufacturing of agricultural inputs, e.g. polybags, fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and fungicides
- Manufacturing of small polyethylene bags Manufacturing of polyvinylchloride for pipes
- Transportation of fungicides; benomyl and thiram Transportation of polybags, fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and fungicides
- Water supply Water supply
- Manufacturing of chemicals e.g. sodium hypochlorite, formalin, lissapol, dettol and spirit Agricultural activities, e.g. application of fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and fungicides; use of polybags
- Transportation of germinated seeds to nursery Transportation of germinated seeds to nursery
- Transportation of fungicides; benomyl and thiram Transportation of seedlings to plantation
- Electricity generation Electricity generation
- Diesel for running water pump Diesel for running water pump
- Emissions from the application of pesticides Emissions from the application of pesticides
Table 1 System boundary (included criteria) (Muhamad et al. 2010; Muhamad et al. 2014)
Production of oil palm germinated seeds / Production of oil palm seedling
Processing Category / Processing category
- Manufacturing , maintenance, and replacement of capital equipment Manufacturing, maintenance, and replacement of capital equipment
- Transportation of capital goods Transportation of capital goods
- Disposal of small polyethylene bags Disposal of small polybags
- Land occupation by seed production unit Land occupation by nursery
- Production of top soil Production of top soil
Table 2 System boundary (excluded criteria) (Muhamad et al. 2010; Muhamad et al. 2014)
Table 3 LCI for production of 1000 germinated oil palm seeds(Muhamad et al. 2014)
Input Amount
Electricity (kWh) 0.624
Diesel (L) 0.173
Polyethylene (kg) 0.019
Water (L) 0.074
Fungicides
Benzimidazole(kg) 0.014
Dithiocarbamate (kg) 0.011
Chemicals
Sodium Hypochlorite 15% (kg) 0.005
Ethanol (L) 0.108
Phenol (L) 0.002
Alcohol (L) 0.003
Transportation (tkm) 3E-06
Corrugated boxes (kg) 0.017
Table 4 LCI for production one oil palm seedling (Muhamad et al. 2010)
Input Amount
Electricity (kWhr) 0.006
Diesel (litre) 0.004
Polybag (kg) 0.002
Water (litre) 1.5
Fertilizers
Nitrogen (kg) 5E-04
Phosphorus pentoxide (kg) 3E-04
Potassium oxide (kg) 2E-04
Pesticides
Thiocarbamate (kg) 1E-05
Pyrethroid (kg) 4E-06
Organophosphate (kg) 2E-05
Dithiocarbamate (kg) 1E-04
Unspecified pesticide (kg) 1E-06
Urea/sulfonyl urea (kg) 2E-05
Glyphosate (kg) 9E-06
Transportation (tkm) 6E-09
Polyvinylchloride (kg) 7E-04
Table 5 LCIA results of production 1000 germinated seeds
Impact category Result Reference unit
Agricultural land occupation 5.71E-02 m2*a
Climate Change 1.04 kg CO2 eq
Fossil depletion 0.595 kg oil eq
Freshwater ecotoxicity 2.25E-02 kg 1,4-DB eq
Freshwater eutrophication 3.90E-04 kg P eq
Human toxicity 0.434 kg 1,4-DB eq
Ionising radiation 7.36E-02 kg U235 eq
Marine ecotoxicity 1.97E-02 kg 1,4-DB eq
Marine eutrophication 5.10E-04 kg N eq
Metal depletion 0.350 kg Fe eq
Natural land transformation 4.70E-04 m2
Ozone depletion 1.77E-07 kg CFC-11 eq
Particulate matter formation 3.47E-03 kg PM10 eq
Photochemical oxidant formation 3.74E-03 kg NMVOC
Terrestrial acidification 1.02E-02 kg SO2 eq
Terrestrial ecotoxicity 2.50E-04 kg 1,4-DB eq
Urban land occupation 7.28E-03 m2*a
Water depletion 1.89 m3
Table 6 LCIA results of production of a single seedling
Impact category Result Reference unit
Agricultural land occupation 6.60E-04 m2*a
Climate Change 1.42E-02 kg CO2 eq
Fossil depletion 1.06E-02 kg oil eq
Freshwater ecotoxicity 2.00E-04 kg 1,4-DB eq
Freshwater eutrophication 3.76E-06 kg P eq
Human toxicity 3.14E-03 kg 1,4-DB eq
Ionising radiation 1.38E-03 kg U235 eq
Marine ecotoxicity 1.70E-04 kg 1,4-DB eq
Marine eutrophication 2.70E-06 kg N eq
Metal depletion 4.40E-04 kg Fe eq
Natural land transformation 6.75E-06 m2
Ozone depletion 3.31E-09 kg CFC-11 eq
Particulate matter formation 3.09E-05 kg PM10 eq
Photochemical oxidant formation 5.28E-05 kg NMVOC
Terrestrial acidification 7.10E-05 kg SO2 eq
Terrestrial ecotoxicity 9.27E-07 kg 1,4-DB eq
Urban land occupation 1.00E-04 m2*a
Water depletion 2.12E-02 m3
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