Comparison of the ecological footprint and a life cycle impact assessment method for a case study on Brazilian broiler feed production

Environmental variables are increasingly being used in decision-making. An important way to generate environmental information involves Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), methodology that measures the environmental impacts of a product throughout its life cycle. Parallel to this, Wackernagel and Rees developed a methodology to assess the environmental sustainability of regions, the Ecological Footprint (EF) method. Recently, this methodology has also been applied to product evaluations. It is believed that there are differences in the interpretation of the results when using the EF method compared to LCA methods. Therefore, the objective of this work was to compare the different interpretation that can be obtained from CML 2001 and EF, using a case study of four scenarios of broiler feed production in Brazil. The inventory was collected with secondary data, and the main difference among the four scenarios was the origin of the maize and soybeans used (the center-west and south regions of Brazil). As a result, the worst scenario (with maize and soybeans from the center-west) and the best scenario (with maize and soybeans from the south) were the same for both methods, although the second and the third rankings were different. Additionally, we observed that different hotspots were identified. CML (modified) and EF were similar from a broad point of view, but higher differences emerged between them when a deeper analysis was considered. We conclude that the use of EF is not suitable for the agricultural sector, since misleading decisions can be taken as a result of neglecting some important environmental impacts (e.g.: eutrophication and acidification) for this economic sector.