Environmental impact of Agaricus bisporus cultivation process

•Detailed analysis of the cultivation process of Mushroom (Agaricus bisporus variety).•Life cycle assessment (cradle-to-gate) to analyse the Mushroom environmental impact.•The research includes traditional and climate-controlled cultivation methods.•The GHG emission of mushroom cultivation is 4.42 kg CO2 eq per kg of product.

This paper analyses the environmental impact of the process of cultivating Agaricus bisporus. Cultivation is the final phase of the mushroom production process. We seek to quantify the environmental impact of this process by means of a life-cycle analysis (LCA).This paper presents a cradle-to-gate LCA of the process of farming Agaricus bisporus mushrooms, based on actual data from a production plant gathered over the course of a year so as to provide accurate information on the environmental impact of the various activities that make up the production process.An overall analysis of the main phases of the production process reveals that the activity with the greatest impact in almost all categories is the climate control of the growing chambers, because of the considerable amount of energy required to power the system, which is running continuously. The only impact categories in which climate control is not the number one phase are global warming in the growing phase and ozone layer depletion and eutrophication in the covering soil preparation phase.