Life cycle assessment of aeroponic cultivation chamber

In the last ten years, the world population has increased from 6.94 billion to 8.06 billion people. As the world population grows, the primary needs of the entire community also grow: finding drinking water and food. For this reason, in recent years, there has been a focus on the exploration of technological advancements aimed at enabling larger yields of agricultural products within limited spaces. This led to the emergence of soilless agriculture, a method involving the cultivation of crops without conventional soil and instead utilizing a tailored nutritional solution and automated processes to provide water and essential nutrients for each specific crop. This thesis therefore aims to analyze, through the Life Cycle Assessment methodology, the impacts of the life cycle of lettuce grown in a Vertical Farm with an aeroponic system. The system was studied only during the production and cleaning phases as the marketing of the product was not envisaged. The data relating to all outgoing and incoming flows from the production process were collected in the laboratory, constituting an inventory implemented in SimaPro software. Subsequently, the fluxes were converted into potential impacts using CML-IA method in its baseline version and selecting seven potential impact categories: global warming, ozone layer depletion, human toxicity, abiotic depletion, acidification, eutrophication, fresh-water aquatic ecotoxicity, terrestrial ecotoxicity, photo-oxidant formation and marine ecotoxicity. Furthermore, the Global Warming and cumulative energy demand parameters were calculated respectively using the GWP100 and Cumulative Energy Demand methods. The analysis revealed that the cultivation phase has the greater environmental impact. This is due, above all, to the usage of chemical fertilizers and electricity. Several proposed implementations aim to enhance the dominant phase of the system, thereby reducing its environmental impact. To determine its potential as a viable alternative to conventional cultivation techniques, a comparison was made between this system and a greenhouse that shares the same boundary conditions. According to the analysis conducted, it has been found that vertical farms are not always a sustainable substitute for traditional cultivation systems.