Multiyear life energy and life cycle assessment of orange production in Iran

Increasing agricultural production requires the application of more chemical inputs during the growth of different crops. This study aims at assessing the energy indicators and environmental impacts during the initial 7-year growth of orange orchards. Through the life cycle assessment (LCA) technique, the hotspots in 11 environmental indicators of the orange orchard growth were determined for different years. The system boundaries were considered to be the orange orchard gates, and the functional units were 1 kg of orange and 1-h orange orchard. The energy input of nitrogen fertilizer, diesel, and human labor has the biggest share in the total energy inputs. The total average energy input and energy output (in 7 years) were calculated as 62,917.027 MJ/ha and 47,618.17 MJ/ha, respectively. The results showed that the energy indices (energy efficiency and net energy) were increasing from year first to seventh and also the share of renewable energy increased. According to the results, with respect to the highest share for production of 1 kg orange in different criteria, nitrogen fertilizer was the main contributor to abiotic depletion and human toxicity, orchard field emissions and nitrogen fertilizer had the highest shares in global warming and photochemical oxidation, fossil fuels and nitrogen fertilizer were the highest contributors to ozone layer depletion, whereas ecotoxicity was mainly affected by chemical fertilizers and orchard surface emissions. Finally, the main contributor for acidification and eutrophication was surface emissions. In the study of environmental impacts from the first to the seventh year, it should be noted that if the functional unit is considered mass based (1 kg orange), due to the unproductive of the trees in the first to third years (low fruit production), the environmental effects are high and then it decreases after the third year due to increasing the yield of the product. Generally, with consideration of the tree growth period, the useful data of energy and environmental impacts for production horticultural products can be provided so that we can avoid multiple interpretations of results associated to reporting annual energy and environmental impact variations.