Streamlined life cycle assessment for the italian agri-food sector: an integrated methodological and database framework

The lack of a time effective method to determine product specific carbon emissions affects retailers’ decision-making processes related to decarbonisation. When navigating hundreds of thousands of product categories, applying specialised accounting methods such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) at scale is unsustainable both in terms of human and financial resources. At the same time, the lack of secondary environmental impact data tailored to Italian supply chains further widens this gap. Processes and products must either be modelled from scratch each time or, otherwise, nonrepresentative European average processes are used, which decrease data quality of product carbon footprint (PCR) studies. This work closes this gap by pioneering the development of a novel, integrated framework combining a streamlined LCA (STLCA) methodology with a new, regionally adapted LCI database, FoodPrint Italy (FPI). The framework is designed to increase process efficiency in PCR by simplifying data requirements on the client side while maintaining the quality of the outputs with a robust, parameterized database built from academic literature, industry data, and national statistics, using the AGRIBALYSE 3.2 database as a structural foundation. To date, the framework was successfully applied to over 20 product categories for major Italian retailers located in Lombardy, significantly reducing analysis time (to 2-3 weeks) and improving data quality (DQR). The FPI database was populated with close to one hundred Life Cycle Inventories (LCIs) specific to Italian food manufacturing supply chains. This integrated system provides a scalable, transparent, science-based toolkit for Italian companies in food & retail to accurately quantify environmental impact at scale and achieve strategic decarbonisation goals, addressing a critical gap in existing carbon accounting practice.