Anais do Simpósio Latino Americano de Ciências de Alimentos
Anais do 14 SLACA - Simpósio Latino Americano de Ciência de Alimentos

The sustainability of production systems includes the reduction of environmental impacts. The partial replacement of fossil fuels by renewable sources contributes positively to the energy supply chain, which is the case of biodiesel. Among the raw materials for biodiesel production, palm oil has a great potential especially considering the expansion in its cultivation. The use of environmental impact assessment methodologies such as life cycle analysis (LCA) is of great importance for monitoring and improving the sustainability of processes. In this context, this work was aimed at performing the life cycle assessment of a (hypothetical) biodiesel product system from palm oil produced in Brazil, considering an energy-based functional unit. Also, a comparative study with fossil diesel in trucks was also performed, considering a unit of 1 MJ. Literature data were combined and entered into the OpenLca software. Impacts were calculated using attributional approach, economic allocation, Recipe Midpoint (Hierarchist) method, assessing the categories: fossil resource scarcity, global warming, land use and water use. Diesel inventory were those available in Agribalyse database. Results showed that the palm cultivation stage had the greatest impact contribution in all categories evaluated, compared to biodiesel processing stage, which was expected since agricultural production has great representation in these categories. The impacts associated to use of land and water for palm biodiesel showed values higher than 65% in relation to fossil diesel, due to the agricultural stage. However, the contribution to global warming and scarcity of fossil resources related to fossil diesel were about 4 and 8 times, respectively, compared to palm biodiesel. Therefore, LCA showed that both fuels have relevant impacts on the evaluated categories, requiring improvement of technologies to reduce the environmental impacts.