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Life cycle assessment of rice bran oil production: a case study in China

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Abstract

Environmental problems caused by the food processing industry have always been one of the concerns for the public. Herein, for the first time, a gate-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) was employed to evaluate the environmental impact of rice bran oil production. Four subsystems, namely, transportation of the raw rice bran to oil factory, crude oil extraction, oil refining, and oil storage, were established. The product sustainability software GaBi and the method CML 2001-Jan. 2016 were used to calculate and analyze the environmental burdens at each stage of the rice bran oil production chain. The results show the oil refining stage had the greatest environmental impact, followed by the oil extraction stage. High demands for coal and electricity make a critical difference in generating vast majority of environmental impacts. Modifying the electricity source and replacing traditional fuels with cleaner ones will do bring benefits to the sustainable development of the industry.

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Acknowledgements

The authors warmly thank Dr. Haochen Hou for the technical support in Monte Carlo simulations.

Funding

This study was supported by the General Project of the Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province (2019-MS-044).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Ocean Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Panjin, Liaoning, 124221, People’s Republic of China

    Li-Hui Sun, Yu-Ying Wang & Yu-Qing Gong

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  1. Li-Hui Sun
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  2. Yu-Ying Wang
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  3. Yu-Qing Gong
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Contributions

Lihui Sun: Conceptualization; Project administration; Roles/Writing — original draft; Writing — review and editing;

Yuying Wang: Roles/Writing — original draft; Investigation; Data curation;

Yuqing Gong: Resources; Validation;

All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Li-Hui Sun.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Sun, LH., Wang, YY. & Gong, YQ. Life cycle assessment of rice bran oil production: a case study in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 39847–39859 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-18172-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-18172-0

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