Life cycle assessment of olive oil and the resulting biomass briquettes

Abstract

The value-adding of agricultural and forestry waste by briquetting is one of the most widely used and focused applications in the bioenergy sector in Lebanon, a Mediterranean nation. This study intends to evaluate the environmental effects of olive oil making as well as the biomass briquettes made from olive oil residue. SimaPro software (Analyst version 9.3.0.3) is used along with the IMPACT 2002+ methodology and the ecoinvent (version 3.8). Results show that for the olive oil-making process, bottling of olive oil contributes to more than 80% for almost all impact categories. While for the briquetting, results clearly show that compressing dried olive residue contributes more than 75% to almost all impact categories. For instance, for ozone layer depletion, compressing dried olive residue contributes around 82%, drying the olive residue life cycle stage has an impact of about 17%, and the packaging of the briquette life cycle stage has an impact of around 1%. A sensitivity analysis was done for the glass bottles weight to check the results robustness.