From peatland to market – how to calculate the life-cycle for paludiculture products?

Clemens Kleinspehn is working to calculate the environmental impact of a Paludi product over its entire life cycle within the PaludiAllianz project of Greifswald University and partners. This analysis is quite important – it provides a basis for its economic competitiveness.

Mr Kleinspehn, LCA – what exactly does that mean?
Life cycle analysis is a systemic method for ecological reporting. It records the environmental impact of a product throughout its entire life cycle – from raw material extraction through recycling until its disposal. There are two different types of LCAs: one for process optimisation in production and the other for comparing two products. The latter is more relevant to us, because we want to show that paludiculture products perform better than their common competitors.

And which product is currently being examined?
 We are focusing on the shipping carton used by the OTTO Group, which contains 10% paludiculture biomass.

And how exactly do you conduct an LCA – specifically for a paludiculture product?
That's a bit of a challenge. Usually, ecological databases such as Ecoinvent, Sphera or Ökobaudat are used for the calculation. But these do not contain any data on paludiculture, yet. We have to compile the data ourselves within our project PaludiAllianz PaludiAllianz - Moorwissen de.
Data is collected for each step of the process – for biomass production, for example, you would look at sowing, fertilisation, time and energy consumption when using machinery. One could go into more in-depth and include the production of the machinery itself in the calculation. However, there are no mandatory criteria for what must be included in LCAs – it is at the discretion of the analyst. Thus, there is no common standard and LCAs can be misleading to present products in a favourable light. One well-known example of this is nuclear power, which has great ratio of produced power to produced CO2, if uranium extraction, the construction and deconstruction of power plants and the disposal of fuel rods are not included in the calculations.

Hmm, ok – but surely, you wouldn‘t want to manipulate anything - what does that mean in terms of the discretion of this LCA?
We are guided by existing LCAs – there is one for grass paper and one for Sylphie paper. Both are competing products that we want to compare ourselves with. That is why we use similar standards. Our LCA focuses on the categories of water and energy consumption, biodiversity and the resulting GHG emissions. Reduced soil-borne emissions in particular play a role in paludiculture products.  Since we are limited in our working capacity, other categories, which are often included in the construction sector, like for example ecotoxicity, will not be considered in our LCA. We are still pondering one question: Will our LCA compare paludiculture to agriculture on organic soils or also to mineral soils? In any case, we would present our results transparently.

You are usually not present when biomass is harvested or pressed into cardboard. How do you calculate the ecological impacts?
We will use data from many colleagues and partners, some of whom have been researching and publishing on paludiculture for a long time. For example, they have recorded the work processes involved in many harvests using cameras, GoPros. The processing companies also provide data, since it’s in their own interrest. We already have data from paper production and are currently missing only the ‘cradle to gate’ section - from raw material to factory. This section is currently missing, for example what is the ecological impact, if hay is pressed into pellets and thus prepared for paper production.

Does that take quite a long time? What is the timeframe for this LCA?
Once all the data has been collected, there is standardised software for LCAs. We commission this calculation and then estimate six months – not including the time required for research, of course. This is a significant initial investment for a case study based on the OTTO shipping box. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile because individual work phases can be transferred to other product LCAs, for example from raw material extraction in the field to transport to the factory.

Can you say anything about the different phases yet? There is also production, use and disposal to consider...
At least this much:  From gate to grave – i.e. from leaving production to disposal – paludiculture products are comparable to existing products in the paper and cardboard sector under consideration. This is because, for example, the machines used in production are the same. However, the big difference in the environmental impact of paludiculture products is the extraction of biomass at the very beginning. More cannot be said at this stage.

What happens once the LCA is ready?
Customers ask companies for LCAs because they are a criterion for purchasing. They make their decision based on product quality, cost and the ecological footprint, as evidenced by an LCA, for example. A higher price can be justified by the other two criteria.
Transparency regarding a product's ecological footprint is therefore important. Our analysis will be published and provide a basis for comparison for other producers and interested citizens. For example LCAs express climate impact in tons of CO2 equivalents per ton produced paper, which makes them understandable even to laypeople.

Mr Kleinspehn – does this analysis hold a particular fascination for you?
I find it interesting to first identify the individual production steps of a product in LCAs and then determine the variables. For example, in the case of fertilisation – how often or how much fertiliser was used? Or in the case of energy consumption – is it fossil-based or renewable? For me, as a passionate computer gamer, it's a bit like a game where you can put components together.

The interview was conducted by Nina Körner.