Environmental impact of an Italian wine bottle: Carbon and water footprint assessment

•Comparative analysis of the carbon and water footprint of an Italian red wine;•Original methodology for blue and grey components of the total water footprint;•The system boundaries include all the cradle-to-grave phases for both CF and EF;•A correlation is found between CF and indirect components of the WF;•Results are consistent with similar studies for CF and WF alone.

The food sector represents one of the major impacting sectors from an environmental point of view and, among all the products, wine emerges as one of the most studied by the literature. Single-issue approaches are commonly used, but a more comprehensive analysis is desirable, since a single indicator does not properly track the pressure on the environment. This paper presents a combined carbon and water footprint assessment, with a cradle to grave approach, for a protected designation of origin Italian red wine, and suggests a correlation among the two indicators across the life cycle phases. A total CF equal to 1.07 ± 0.09 kgCO2eq/bottle and a total WF equal to 580 ± 30 l/bottle were calculated for the studied product and a direct proportionality was found between the total CF and the sum of WFgreyindirect and WFblue.

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