[en] The aim of this study is to have a good understanding of the environmental impact of glucose production. Glucose is generally produced from corn or wheat. Since agricultural processes are known to be difficult to evaluate by LCA, the results obtained with two different LCA databases, Gabi and EcoInvent, are compared in this work.
The production of glucose from raw materials can be divided in two steps: the agricultural step allowing the plant production, and the conversion step including the extraction of the starch from the plant and its hydrolysis into glucose. Preliminary results underline the high impact of the agricultural step, so a special attention has been paid to these data. Specific Belgian data collected by the Walloon Agricultural Research Centre (CRA-W) (2014) [1] have been used as primary data (yield, amount of fertilizers, etc.), either using EcoInvent or Gabi datasets background data to model fertilizers, diesel consumption, etc. A third model was built using only data available in Ecoinvent for corn and wheat cultures. For the conversion step, literature data have been used along with some industrial data. As few studies are available in the literature concerning starch hydrolysis, the focus has been placed on data validation (mass balance checks, cross-reference information, etc.).
Based on these multiple sources, it is possible to compare the LCA results for the production of 1 kg of glucose for three different cases, summarized in the following table.
Table 1: Summary of modelled cases
Agricultural step Conversion steps
Primary data Dataset Primary data Dataset
Case 1 Belgian GaBi Literature + Industry GaBi
Case 2 Belgian Ecoinvent Literature + Industry Ecoinvent
Case 2 Ecoinvent Literature + Industry Ecoinvent
The results obtained using these three models will be presented, at both the inventory and impact assessment steps. They show significant differences and highlight the need to understand in depth the involved assumptions when developing the datasets, in addition to the ones adopted for the inventory.
Disciplines :
Chemical engineering
Author, co-author :
Gerbinet, Saïcha ; Université de Liège > Department of Chemical Engineering > Génie chimique - Procédés et développement durable
Belboom, Sandra ; Université de Liège > Department of Chemical Engineering > Génie chimique - Procédés et développement durable
Léonard, Angélique ; Université de Liège > Department of Chemical Engineering > Génie chimique - Procédés et développement durable
Language :
English
Title :
Glucose production: influence of the datasets choice on LCA results