`First Carbon Footprint Calculator for the Olive Industry - Olive Oil Times
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enEnglish
enEnglishfrFrançaiselελληνικάdeDeutscheitItalianozh-CN中文ptPortuguêsesEspañoltrTürkçehrHrvatskija日本語hiहिंदी

First Carbon Footprint Calculator for the Olive Industry

By Naomi Tupper
Mar. 13, 2013 11:30 UTC
Summary Summary

Citoliva will present new soft­ware at a con­fer­ence in Spain on March 21st designed to quan­tify the car­bon foot­print in olive oil pro­duc­tion, coin­cid­ing with the final results of the OiLCA project aimed at reduc­ing emis­sions and waste in the sec­tor. The soft­ware, devel­oped by Citoliva, will help olive oil busi­nesses eval­u­ate their envi­ron­men­tal impact and find ways to reduce car­bon diox­ide emis­sions while con­sid­er­ing cost and effi­ciency.

Spanish tech­nol­ogy and oil cen­ter Citoliva will present what it calls the first soft­ware designed to quan­tify the car­bon foot­print in the olive oil mak­ing process at a tech­ni­cal con­fer­ence next week.

The con­fer­ence will take place on March 21st at the Museum of Olive Oil Assets and Sustainability in the Science and Technology Park GEOLIT located in Mengibar, Spain. The release of the new soft­ware will coin­cide with the pre­sen­ta­tion of the final results of the European project known as OiLCA, or Olive Oil Life Cycle Assessment, an ini­tia­tive that was devel­oped to improve the com­pet­i­tive­ness and reduce the car­bon foot­print of the olive oil sec­tor by opti­miz­ing waste man­age­ment and imple­ment­ing an eco-label.

The newly cre­ated cal­cu­la­tor has been designed to quan­tify and eval­u­ate the car­bon foot­print in olive oil mak­ing processes and cal­cu­lates ways to reduce car­bon diox­ide emis­sions while still tak­ing into account the costs of these changes.

Decisions are made based on envi­ron­men­tal and eco­nomic cri­te­ria through the novel tool, which is avail­able to com­pa­nies in the sec­tor for free. The new soft­ware will be pre­sented as a help­ful option for olive oil busi­nesses to deter­mine their envi­ron­men­tal impact, and to iden­tify ways to reduce their gas emis­sions, an area where olive oil pro­duc­ers are under increas­ing pres­sure to improve per­for­mance.

Olive oil pro­duc­tion is more costly than that of other edi­ble oils, and once the oil is obtained from the fruit it involves even more time and input to pro­duce the final prod­uct. Waste and residue is par­tic­u­larly high in olive oil pro­duc­tion with the man­age­ment of stone, pulp and resid­ual oil waste one of the key areas that needs to be tar­geted when it comes to envi­ron­men­tal impact.

Sustainable devel­op­ment and reduc­tion of the car­bon foot­print in the var­i­ous stages of olive oil pro­duc­tion is an area that needs to be focused on by busi­nesses in the sec­tor, and it is hoped that the devel­op­ment of the new cal­cu­la­tor will make excel­lence in these areas more achiev­able. This not only offers envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits, but also a pos­si­ble mar­ket­ing advan­tage for com­pa­nies who are rec­og­nized for doing their part to reduce emis­sions and man­age waste effec­tively.

The soft­ware and find­ings of the OilCa project have been dri­ven by research car­ried out by Citoliva, but have received input from a wide vari­ety of orga­ni­za­tions around Spain and Europe.


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