Dataset on the life cycle assessment of the production of stabilized lactic acid bacteria

TL;DR

This paper presents a dataset on the environmental impact of producing lactic acid bacteria, useful for eco-design and environmental labeling.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new dataset from pilot-scale experiments on lactic acid bacteria production using Life Cycle Assessment.

Findings

Environmental data from 30 production scenarios of lactic acid bacteria concentrates were collected.

LCI data includes mass and energy flows, equipment, and biological activity measurements.

The dataset supports future LCAs and eco-design applications in the food industry.

Abstract

Lactic acid bacteria are widely used in the food and pharmaceutical industries to produce fermented foods and probiotics. However, very little is known about the environmental impacts of their production processes. This dataset provides appropriate data related to the environmental assessment by Life Cycle Assessment of thirty scenarios of production processes to produce lactic acid bacteria concentrates at the pilot scale. Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) foreground data were collected during experiments performed in 2021 in Biosearch Life, a Kerry Group company (Granada, Spain). They were manually measured, registered with sensors (tap water, steam, compressed air, and electricity consumption), or found in the technical and scientific literature. Storage experiments and biological activity measurements were performed during 2021 and 2022 in AgroParisTech (Thiverval-Grignon, France). Background data came from the database Ecoinvent 3.9.1, completed by Agribalyse 3.0. LCI of the fructo-oligosaccharide (FOS) protectants' production was obtained from another data paper. Life Cycle Impact Assessments (LCIA) were computed with SimaPro v9.5 software (Pré consultant) with the “EF 3.0 Method (adapted) V1.00 / EF 3.0 normalization and weighting set” to obtain the midpoint indicators. The dataset contains all the inventory data (mass and energy flows, equipment) and the biological activity data. The Life Cycle Inventory data could be reused by scientists for future LCAs. The environmental impacts computed by Life Cycle Assessment could be reused by scientists or the food industry for eco-design or environmental labeling.

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