Life cycle assessment of concentrated apple juice production in China: Mitigation options to reduce the environmental burden

Though many studies concern the agro-food sector and its environmental impacts in some countries worldwide, literature is quite rare in works regarding life cycle assessment (LCA) application on concentrated apple juice (CAJ) in China. However, China is a global leader in CAJ production and export, so the sustainability of which is of great consequence to apple farmers and stakeholders in its value chain. With its feasibility to assess and quantify all environmental inputs and outputs that occur at all phases of production, LCA is receiving increasing attention as a tool to support global sustainability initiatives. This paper represents one of the first studies on CAJ using the LCA method to present the environmental impacts and suggest feasible strategies to improve environmental performance. We find that the apple production phase is the main cause of environmental impacts, with a contribution up to 86.68%, while the juice production phase only accounts for 13.32%. For the apple production phase, fertilizers and pesticides represent more than 88.87% in all the categories considered. For the juice production phase, bio-pellets contribute more than 74.73% in eight of the eleven impact categories. Thus, fertilizers, pesticides, and bio-pellets were recognized to be the main hotspots. The scenario analysis indicates that the environmental impacts have a significant reduction (by 21.39–98.39%) in each category via reducing the number of fertilizers by 33, 38, and 35% for N, P2O5, and K2O, and 99% for pesticides, and 33.31% for bio-pellets, respectively. Urgently, the mitigation option should pay attention to the replacement of currently used fertilizers and pesticides, and bio-pellets used to traditional thermal concentration by the standards of organically produced in the apple production phase and forward osmosis membrane technology in the juice production phase simultaneously, which is most significant for the sustainable development of CAJ.