Life cycle assessment of canned fish production in Thailand

Abstract

The canned fish industry is one of the world's most popular exports in Thailand. Moreover, the canned seafood industry ranks fourth in terms of energy consumption, which compares to all industry group (Wiriyatangsakul, 2021). Commercial competitiveness, on the other hand, must be improved because of the competitive conditions in the global market. Thus, this study evaluates the environmental performance of a factory in Samut Sakhon, Thailand, using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with Gate-to-Gate approach and setting functional unit by 1 ton fresh fish entering to process. The study used the SimaPro LCA application with the CML 2 baseline 2000 method, which covers ten impact categories. The result of LCA showed that human toxicity (3,800 kg 1,4-DB eq/ FU), global warming (2,470 kg CO2 eq/ FU), marine aquatic ecotoxicity (24,100 kg 1,4-DB eq/ FU), freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity (22.5 kg 1,4-DB eq/ FU), and terrestrial ecotoxicity (2.72 kg 1,4-DB eq/ FU) were found to have the greatest environmental impacts from 10 categories. Those categories are caused by packaging and steam consumption by 49% and 48%, respectively. Therefore, this study utilized clean technology to assess technical, economic, and environmental feasibility in order to prioritize resource consumption and propose options. The result showed that packaging, steam and water consumption were prioritized in the top three of CT, which was consistent with the LCA results except for water consumption. The following are some options for reducing packaging, water, and steam consumption: Use of packaging as primary packaging (glass, plastic, and recycled material) has the potential to reduce the environmental border to air by approximately 95% and the environmental border to water by 40 to 50%. (J. Laso, 2016). Steam consumption options are using biomass residue as a secondary combustion material in the production of steam could reduce CO2 eq by 38,308 kg CO2 eq/year, using wood pellet biomass could reduce CO2 eq by up to 33,311 kg CO2 eq/year, and improving boiler combustion by installing oxygen detectors could reduce CO2 eq by up to 19,149 kg CO2 eq/year. Water consumption options are reusing water in washing can packaging could reduce CO2 eq up to 2,003 kg CO2 eq/year, and Installing water high-pressure cleaner for washing floor could reduce CO2 eq up to 1,698 kg CO2 eq/year.