Agenda

10 Nov 2016 12:15

Aquaculture: sustainable or not sustainable, this is the question

Campus Scientifico via Torino - edificio DELTA, Aula 0B

Andrea Alberto Forchino, DAIS - Ca' Foscari

Titolo: AQUACULTURE: SUSTAINABLE OR NOT SUSTAINABLE, THIS IS THE QUESTION A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to aquaponics

Abstract:
In the near future aquaculture will be able to cope with the expected increase in demand and at the same time to ensure a reduction of environmental impacts. Thus, sustainability will be the keyword for the development of this sector. In these last years, new holistic approaches have been proposed to investigate the sustainability of productive activities, including aquaculture. In particular, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) represents a powerful and flexible tool to investigate the impacts linked to aquaculture practices. Among these latter, aquaponics represents a new emerging sector which is attracting the attention of both scientists and new entrepreneurs. However, if on the one hand aquaponics is generally considered as a sustainable practice, on the other the environmental burdens linked to this practice are not still deeply investigated. In the present study we use the LCA to evaluate the environmental impacts of two hypothetical aquaponics systems: Raft System (RS) and Media-Filled Beds System (MFBS). For both the systems rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mikiss) and lettuce (Lactuca sativa) are assumed to be the cultivated species. The Simapro© software V.8.0 is used for calculation. Results show that the cultivation of lettuce in floating system seems to be less impacting than the cultivation in gravel system. Analyses underlined that the main contributions to environmental impacts are due to infrastructures, electricity and fish feed. The LCA analyses conducted in this study underlined that the choice of less impacting materials and the optimization of management practices should be considered a priority in order to reduce environmental impacts deriving from this activity.

Bio Sketch:
Andrea Alberto Forchino is a Ph.D. biologist specialized in aquaculture. At present, he has a research contract at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics. One of the main topics of his research is the use of the Life Cycle Assessment to investigate the sustainability of the aquaculture processes, including aquaponics. He has co-authored 5 publications.

Lingua

L'evento si terrà in italiano

Organizzatore

Dipartimento di Scienze Ambientali, Informatica e Statistica - Prof. Pastres

Cerca in agenda