OLCA-Pest

The main objective of the OLCA-Pest project is to build on current advances in life cycle inventory and life cycle impact assessment to operationalise and harmonize the emission quantification and impact characterization of pesticides in life cycle assessment (LCA) and product environmental footprinting. In current LCA practice, quantifying pesticide emissions from agricultural fields is not aligned with characterising related potential toxicological impacts on humans and different types of ecosystems. Furthermore, the pathways from pesticide application via emissions to environmental media and treated field crops to toxicity impacts are currently only partly and inconsistently covered and many relevant pesticides are currently not included. This leads to LCA results that are incomplete and often misleading and hard to interpret and this makes it impossible to assess and compare the environmental performance profiles of different pest management systems and practices.