Sustainability of woody products: estimation of environmental impacts from pellets production by means of LCA methodology

Nowadays the interest on quantifying and analysing the environmental impacts related to processes and products is constantly increasing. Research in different sectors is being developed in order to obtain environmental improvements to approach a sustainability conception. The most common actions, focused on the reduction of the environmental burdens derived from a specific product, are to improve the efficiency of the productive processes and to use renewable raw materials minimising the dependence on fossil fuels. In this context forests play a key-role as source of wood as renewable energy and material. However the extraction of the wood, as the extraction of no-renewable resources, involves the use of fossil fuels that imply a set of environmental impacts. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology largely used in industrial processes to improve their efficiency and to evaluate the related impacts. Different studies have already given a first overview of the impacts derived from forest operations. The most of these studies have been developed in high-productive forests and industrial plantations, where the use of intensive practices has an important role on the environmental profile. Only a small part of the forest surface is under industrial management in Italy. The majority of forests are located in mountainous areas, often in steep terrain and under a “close to nature” management regime. Usually, the forest practices are absent or limited to extraordinary situations. After cutting the renewal is mostly natural. The aim of this work is to evaluate the environmental impacts related to pellets production in a case study in Tuscany using the LCA methodology in a cradle-to-gate perspective, considering all the activities involved from wood extraction in no-industrial forests to packed pellets production, ready for delivery to final users. The environmental profile has been performed in terms of impact categories commonly assessed in woody sector: Climate Change, Terrestrial Acidification, Photochemical Oxidant Formation, Freshwater and Marine Eutrophication. The environmental results report how the most of the impacts in pellets production life cycle are related to the industrial processes carried out in the pellet factory, while forest operations contribute marginally. The production of electricity requirements (directly taken from the national grid) has been identified as the environmental hotspot in the majority of environmental indicators examined.