1. Environmental Impact of Corn Tortilla Production: A Case Study
- Author
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Paul Taboada-González, Quetzalli Aguilar-Virgen, Liliana Márquez-Benavides, Diego Guzmán-Soria, and Eduardo Baltierra-Trejo
- Subjects
020209 energy ,02 engineering and technology ,010501 environmental sciences ,01 natural sciences ,environmental impact ,life cycle assessment ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Production (economics) ,General Materials Science ,Environmental impact assessment ,Instrumentation ,Life-cycle assessment ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes ,business.industry ,Process Chemistry and Technology ,Recipe ,Fossil fuel ,General Engineering ,Particulates ,Pulp and paper industry ,Environmentally friendly ,Computer Science Applications ,corn ,climate change ,Biofuel ,Environmental science ,business ,CO2 emission - Abstract
The research on the environmental impacts of corn-derived products has been mainly on cultivation techniques and the production of biofuels, so there is limited information on the impacts produced by the transformation of corn for human consumption. The tortilla is a millennial product derived from corn of which consumption is increasing in North America. The aim of this study is to identify the environmental hotspots of the tortilla using a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. The process studied included only the corn&ndash, nixtamalisation&ndash, dough&ndash, tortillas production. The functional unit is one kg of tortillas packed in kraft paper. The impacts of the tortilla production process were evaluated using SimaPro 8.5.0 software, considering ReCiPe Midpoint. The production has the greatest impact in 15 of the 18 impact categories. The normalisation reveals that the most significant impacts concentrate in the categories terrestrial acidification (TA), particulate matter formation (PMF), marine ecotoxicity (MET) and fossil fuel depletion (FD). Improvements in the cultivation could mean more environmentally friendly tortilla production.
- Published
- 2019
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