Academic Journal
From Soil to Factory Gate: Cradle-to-Gate Life Cycle Assessment of Sri Lankan Tea.
| Τίτλος: | From Soil to Factory Gate: Cradle-to-Gate Life Cycle Assessment of Sri Lankan Tea. |
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| Συγγραφείς: | Liyanage, Arudhi, Dunuwila, Pasan, Gunawardena, Prashanthi, Goto, Naohiro |
| Πηγή: | Sustainability (2071-1050); May2026, Vol. 18 Issue 9, p4245, 18p |
| Περίληψη: | This study conducts a cradle-to-gate Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (E-LCA) of tea production in Sri Lanka, comparing smallholder and estate-owned plantations processed by Orthodox and Crush–Tear–Curl (CTC) methods. Unlike most tea LCA studies that treat cultivation as a single undifferentiated phase, this work explicitly incorporates the perennial nature of tea by using a modular life cycle framework that separates the agronomic stages alongside factory processing up to the packed-tea gate. This approach allows a more precise allocation of long-term environmental burdens over the entire productive lifespan of the tea plant, addressing a methodological gap in the literature. Four production scenarios were evaluated: Smallholder-Orthodox, Smallholder-CTC, Estate-Orthodox, and Estate-CTC, with the functional unit set to 1 tonne of processed tea. Primary data were gathered through structured surveys of 30 plantations (25 smallholders, 5 estates) and 5 tea factories, supplemented by secondary data from Ecoinvent v3.11 and national statistics. The CML-IA Baseline method in SimaPro v9.5 was applied to characterize impacts across eight impact categories: global warming potential (GWP), abiotic element depletion, fossil fuel depletion, acidification, human toxicity, terrestrial ecotoxicity, freshwater ecotoxicity, and eutrophication. Results indicate that Smallholder-Orthodox systems have the highest GWP (3304 kg CO |
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| Βάση Δεδομένων: | Complementary Index |
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