IFIF is a founding member of the Global Feed LCA Institute (GFLI), a feed industry initiative with the aim to develop a freely and publicly available feed LCA database and tool.
The GFLI database and LCA tool will support meaningful LCAs of livestock products using region specific data and enable our sector to benchmark feed industry environmental impacts on a level playing field.
The GFLI database and tool is based on the internationally recognized feed LCA methodology developed by the FAO-led Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership. However, currently neither the LEAP guidelines nor as result the GFLI database, include the production impact and the use benefits of feed additives/specialty feed ingredients (SFIs).
Environmental footprinting of livestock products is a challenging but essential task to improve the accuracy of reporting on the real impacts of livestock products. This includes both understanding where the livestock chain stands in in terms of impact and encouraging the benchmarking and measurement of both individual and collective reduction efforts.
Feed is an important part of the agri-food chain and it is essential that feed operators are able to understand their impact, not only from a business efficiency perspective but also to meet the expectations of our customers and public bodies, at both at national and international level.
Supported by the FAO and LEAP, the GFLI is working to bring the major feed producing regions to the initiative with the aim to become the golden global standard for assessing and benchmarking feed industry impact and improvement in LCA calculations.
The GFLI partners are working to develop and build a feed specific publicly available LCA tool to facilitate environmental assessments and the measurement of continuous improvement, which is both comparable and measurable across world regions.
The database and the tool would be public and freely accessible. The Global Feed LCA Institute has established a formal partnership with FAO and LEAP, to ensure that the deliverables of the GFLI are compliant with the FAO/LEAP methodological requirements.
For more information about the GFLI please visit http://globalfeedlca.org/.