Avaliação do ciclo de vida da valorização dos resíduos sólidos na produção de azeite de oliva

Abstract

Olive growing is on the rise in Brazil, more specifically in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The advancement of this economic activity has been made possible due to the edaphoclimatic conditions of Pampa gaucho are found to be suitable for the cultivation of olive trees. It is known that every activity in the agribusiness sphere generates environmental impact, which makes it necessary to develop a sustainable system that minimizes the uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources. Because it is an emerging crop in the country, there is currently a bottleneck in the literature that guides producers in the management of the residues generated in this production. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is a tool that allows the evaluation of the potential environmental impact of a product or system. Using this methodology, the objective of this work is to evaluate the life cycle of the final destination of solid residues from the production of olive oil in Rio Grande do Sul, in four scenarios: biomass burning, composting, landfill, and direct disposal in the soil. The olive oil extraction companies Azeites do Pampa Agroindústria (Bagé) and Tecnoplanta Florestal (Caçapava do Sul) contributed to this work with information regarding the different valorizations of the olive residue. The four scenarios were chosen because they are destinations that are currently used or have already been used. The soil disposal scenario, in general, obtained the best environmental performance, except in the eutrophication potential, which presents the worst result when compared to the other systems. In turn, composting presented the worst environmental performance, where the major responsible for the negative result comes from the hours worked by the machinery, thus having high diesel consumption. When evaluating the sensitivity of the results through the equivalence of diesel consumption in the scenarios of landfill, biomass burning and composting, the result was different, where composting and biomass burning presented the best result on the issue of eutrophication potential. Furthermore, with the sensitivity analysis, composting and biomass burning ceased to be the most harmful in the climate change category, while the landfill disposal scenario became the most harmful in this category.