I can’t top Imran’s intro to his blog so I won’t even try, but I will say that the dynamic so far on this trip has been pretty amazing. This last week, we have been presented with the opportunity to not only hear about new and ongoing projects but also understand the setting, people, and process contributing to their results. While the poster session itself struck an initial sense of familiarity, the subject matter and explanations from the research authors were refreshingly different in what they brought to the table…and no, I’m not just talking about the snack table.
To be brutally honest, the first poster I chose to study lured me in because it had one of the prettiest backgrounds. However, once I started talking to Valentina, one of the graduate students involved in the “Assessment of Environmental Aspects Related with a Productive System of Organic Wine”, I soon became as interested as she was in explaining it to me.
Coming from Emory, I hear a lot about work on sustainability and environment-friendly initiatives, but for the first time, I was having the environmental studies broken down to the scientific method in which the actual data was quantified. Mike has already mentioned the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Emergy evaluation as the two methods used in this study, and I will continue this discussion with how the new combination of these two processes makes for a more comprehensive and accurate method of gauging sustainability in wine production.
Life Cycle Assessment focused more on the input and outputs (from planting all the way to bottling), but Emergy used solar energy as a measure of direct and indirect expenditure therefore allowing better assessment including both human labor and natural resources. This study took the Life Cycle Inventory used in the LCA and applied it to their Emergy evaluation. The Life Cycle Inventory included factors such as acidification potential, eutrophication potential, global warming potential, and ozone layer depletion. Overall, the production and bottling phases were found to be the most taxing on the environment. Altering the makeup of the glass bottles and instituting biodiesel for field-work were some suggestions thought to be able to counteract some of the negative effects on the environment. By bringing components of LCA into Emergy evaluations, a step toward improving assessment of wine production sustainability can be made in hopes that changes in wine production can be made in the future.
"Altering the makeup of the glass bottles" is an interesting idea. But I wonder if they will keep the glass component of the bottle or completely switch it to another material? On the other hand, a company's financial goals always gets in the way of research. The wine producers will choose the material that will improve the taste and texture of their wine even though a better alternate exists for the environment.
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