Environmental and economic assessment of a pilot aquaponic production: a life cycle approach

Conventional agricultural practices are often pointed out for their heavy environmental burdens such as soil and water pollution, greenhouse gas emission and natural resource depletion. Reducing these impacts is one of the main issues to ensure sustainable food production in a near future. Thanks to the efficient use of water and the nutrient recycling and valorizing, aquaponics is usually presented and perceived as an environmentally sustainable method to produce fish and vegetables.
Indeed, the combination of these two food productions bring up noteworthy advantages and limits the effluent discharge in a local environment, however, it does not erase the drawbacks inherent to culture intensification associated to aquaculture production in RAS or hydroponic culture in closed environments. The main environmental impacts of aquaponics are linked to high energy use (electricity), fish feed addition and infrastructure needs (Boxman et al., 2017; Forchino et al., 2017; Jager et al., 2019). These categories could also be responsible for the main operational economic burdens.
According to the life cycle approach, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the Life Cycle Costing (LCC) represent flexible and performant tools to assess both the environmental and economic sustainability of a given process. These tools were previously performed on the set-up phase of an indoor aquaponic system, giving a picture of the economic and environmental burdens associated to the construction of a pilot production facility (Forchino et al., 2018).
This coupled aquaponic system (total volume: 19 m³), hosted in a 104 m² building, produces tilapia (with an expected yearly production of 1 t), lettuce, rocket salad, basil, coriander and parsley (expected vegetable yearly production: 2 t).
The aim of this study is to evaluate both the environmental and economic sustainability of fish and vegetable production in this aquaponic system through the combined application of LCA and LCC.
Giving a comprehensive vision of the environmental impacts of the aquaponic production, the results will highlight bottlenecks and efficient development levers to improve the system. Moreover, this study will be coupled with a mass balance analysis to assess the nutrient flows between the different compartments of the system and measure the efficiency of nutrient recycling. This functional analysis would help to put into perspective the environmental impacts of the production with the internal functioning of the system and effluent discharge.
Finally, the economic approach will enable a scaling-up simulation to evaluate the opportunity to generate profits.

References
Jaeger C, Foucard P, Tocqueville A, Nahon S, Aubin J, 2019. Mass balanced based LCA of a common carp-lettuce aquaponics system. Aquacultural Engineering 84: 29-41.
Boxman SE, Zhang Q, Bailey D, Trotz MA, 2017. Life Cycle Assessment of a commercial-scale freshwater aquaponic system. Environmental Engineering Science 34(5): 299-311.
Forchino AA, Lourguioui H, Brigolin D, Pastres R, 2017. Aquaponics and sustainability: the comparison of two different aquaponic techniques using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Aquacultural Engineering 77: 80-88.
Forchino A.A., Gennotte V., Maiolo S., Brigolin D., Mélard C., Pastres R., 2018. Eco-designing Aquaponics: a case study of an experimental production system in Belgium. Procedia CIRP 69: 546-550.