Impact-oriented assessment of carbon, water and energy footprints for maize production: a case study in Shandong, China

ABSTRACT

The continuously increasing demands of food, feed and various corn-derived products accelerate the concern about the corn production on environment. Nevertheless, few researches simultaneously address the issue from different perspectives of carbon, water and energy as well as their temporal variations. Herein, a systematic cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment of maize production was conducted with a case study in Shandong, China. Different midpoint and endpoint indices including 10-year average data from 2011 to 2020 and their temporal variations were investigated. The contribution analysis of different processes to these indices revealed that irrigation dominated the midpoint of water scarcity, whereas the sum of direct consumption, fertilizer and diesel production contributed more than 80% to all the other indices. The sensitivity analysis also illustrated that these environmental indices can be reduced by as high as 4% when the aforementioned inputs were individually decreased by 5%. The temporal variation of the global warming potential, aquatic eutrophication and fossil depletion demonstrated that all the three indices were decreased by about 25.0%–31.7% over the last decade. Further persistent efforts to enhance mechanized operation efficiency and explore green and efficient methods for fertilizer and diesel production were highlighted. Moreover, implementations of rational agricultural management such as scientific fertilization and water-efficient irrigation were suggested, in order to have an eco-friendly maize production system.

KEYWORDS:

• Life cycle assessment
• maize production
• carbon footprint
• water footprint
• energy footprint
• temporal variation

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 21868011 and the Foundation of Guangxi Key Laboratory of Plant Functional Phytochemicals and Sustainable Utilization under Grant FPRU2020-2.

Author contributions

Xuan Wang: Investigation, data processing, data curation, writing – original draft.

Lei Xiao: Visualization, data curation.

Zhenyan Fan: Methodology, formal analysis.

Yueyuan Chen: Investigation, funding acquisition.

Zhifang Cui: Conceptualization, writing – review and editing, supervision, and funding acquisition. All authors contributed to the study conception and design.

All authors jointly reviewed and approved the manuscript for publication.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21868011), the Foundation of Guangxi Key Laboratory of Plant Functional Phytochemicals and Sustainable Utilization (FPRU2020-2) and the financial support from Shandong University of Science and Technology.