`Group Announces Project to Reduce Impact of Olive Oil Production - Olive Oil Times
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enEnglishfrFrançaiselελληνικάdeDeutscheitItalianozh-CN中文ptPortuguêsesEspañoltrTürkçehrHrvatskija日本語hiहिंदी

Group Announces Project to Reduce Impact of Olive Oil Production

By Charlie Higgins
Jan. 16, 2011 21:19 UTC

The orga­ni­za­tion CITOLIVA announced a set of ini­tia­tives to reduce the envi­ron­men­tal impact of olive oil pro­duc­tion in the ​“SUDOE“region, which includes Southern France, Spain and Portugal, in a con­fer­ence held in the Spanish province of Jaén this week.

CITOLIVA direc­tor Cristina de Toro and Ernesto Ríos López, Assistant Director of Industrial Development and Innovation at Spain’s Ministry’s of Land and Marine Environment, were among the keynote speak­ers at the event. López expressed his sup­port for the ini­tia­tives:

“They con­cern a prod­uct so impor­tant to the Mediterranean diet, to our insti­tu­tion, and that which is key to our ministry’s com­mit­ment to sus­tain­abil­ity and reduc­ing our envi­ron­men­tal foot­print.”

In her speech Cristina de Toro stated the main goal of CITOLIVA’s ini­tia­tives, which is to unite olive oil pro­duc­ers in the SUDOE region with regards to sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion and land use. By con­sol­i­dat­ing these areas of the indus­try and apply­ing more eco­log­i­cally effi­cient pro­duc­tion meth­ods, the orga­ni­za­tion hopes to improve SUDOE olive oil’s com­pet­i­tive­ness in the inter­na­tional mar­ket.

CITOLIVA will col­lab­o­rate with another orga­ni­za­tion, OiLCA, which will con­duct research to deter­mine the eco­log­i­cal impacts of olive oil pro­duc­tion. The group will look at every stage of pro­duc­tion, from seed to bot­tle, with the goal of estab­lish­ing a stan­dard set of pro­ce­dures regard­ing waste man­age­ment and other fac­tors that affect the envi­ron­ment.

A half a dozen other orga­ni­za­tions from the SUDOE region have agreed to join CITOLIVA’s call for sus­tain­abil­ity. They include Centre Tecnológic de Manresa (Barcelona, Spain), Instituto Andaluz de Tecnología (Sevilla, Spain), Centro para Valorização de Residuos (Braga, Portugal), Laboratoire de Chimie AgroIndustrielle (Toulouse, France) and Associação de Olivicultores de Tras-os- Montes e Alto Douro (Mirandela, Portuga).

The entire project is expected to last two years and will have a bud­get of over 900,000 Euros (US$1.2M). CITOLIVA and oth­ers involved hope the project will improve industry’s image while help­ing to mit­i­gate cli­mate change through more strin­gent envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies.


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