‘for the new visitors and interested minds’

“As you may have understood from browsing over this website, looking at the beautiful range of colours from different legume pulses, and bits and pieces in my biography part, this research project focuses on innovative value chains for legumes. To do so, we are currently conducting a Life Cycle Assessment on a specific value chain.

Some may ask, what is a Life Cycle Assessment or LCA?  Of all the definitions out there, I chose to use the one given from Anderson et al (1994): it’s a process of analysis and assessment for environmental loadings, burdens and effects caused by the production of a product, the process or service it renders throughout its lifespan i.e. “from a cradle to grave’, although more recent use of LCAs also focused on “cradle to cradle”, “cradle to gate” etc.

Originally, LCAs were first developed to assess the environmental loads of the industrial machinery, and its processes. In the 80’s however, a growing movement on having an ecological and sustainable approach to life, activated intense research to assess the burdens associated with our commodities and food systems. indeed, Food systems, led by agricultural processes comes with large impacts on the environment such as intensive use of land, heavy reliance on natural resources. Agriculture is not only relying on climate and biological processes, but also impacts them. Therefore, conducting LCAs, enables us to identify options and opportunities within a value a chain starting at a “cradle” point for improvement.”

 

Innovative use of bean pulses in alcohol distillation

As of mid may, i’ll be visiting and  collecting data from Arbikie distillery in Scotland, and looking at the environmental impacts of using bean pulses as a source of starch for alcohol distillation. Subsequently, the aim is to  investigate potential environmental footprint of using the distillar protein by-products to produce feed for aquaculture purposes.