Spanish Olive Oil to Help Fight Climate Change

The non-profit orga­ni­za­tion Interprofesional del Aceite de Oliva de Español will par­tic­i­pate in a European project which will cal­cu­late the envi­ron­men­tal foot­print of olive oils and their con­tri­bu­tion to reduc­ing green­house gasses.

The Spanish olive oil sec­tor, along with the inter­pro­fes­sional group, will lead the European project titled PEF (Production Environmental Footprint) pilot, an ini­tia­tive that will study the con­trol of green­house gasses dur­ing cli­mate change through the cal­cu­la­tion of the envi­ron­men­tal foot­prints of olive oil tree cul­ti­va­tion and oil pro­duc­tion.

Climate change is a real­ity that no sci­en­tists ques­tion, and the major­ity of Spanish olive oil con­sumers have been widely aware of it, and take into account the effect on the envi­ron­ment when they make their deci­sion on which prod­ucts to pur­chase.

The EU sur­vey Eurobarometer 367 found that 80 per­cent of Europeans are occa­sion­ally con­cerned with buy­ing prod­ucts that in some form relate to improv­ing the envi­ron­ment. In fact, the envi­ron­men­tal impact a prod­uct is a key deter­min­ing fac­tor with con­sumers, just behind the price and qual­ity, when mak­ing a pur­chas­ing deci­sion.

Olive oil indus­tries and chains acknowl­edge that eco­nomic sec­tors that effec­tively com­mu­ni­cate the envi­ron­men­tal infor­ma­tion of their prod­ucts will have an advan­tage over their com­peti­tors, and pro­duc­ers have been quick to iden­tify, through the use of eco­la­bels, prod­ucts and ser­vices that have a reduced envi­ron­men­tal impact through­out their life cycle.

In order for European olive oil con­sumers to have com­plete trust in the eco­la­bels, the European Commission has decided to launch the Pilot Lines project which will define the cat­e­gor­i­cal rules for cal­cu­lat­ing the impact that olive oils have on the envi­ron­ment.

In that con­text, the European Commission aims to develop a strate­gi­cal appa­ra­tus that will estab­lish a sin­gle method to mea­sure the envi­ron­men­tal foot­print of a prod­uct (PEF) or an orga­ni­za­tion (Organization Environmental Footprint-OEF) which will focus on its life cycle. The project is expected to begin in early 2017, involv­ing the stake­hold­ers and researchers of coun­tries includ­ing Spain, Italy, Grace and Portugal.

The inter­pro­fes­sional group’s main objec­tive for the project is to improve the actual model that is cur­rently being used to mea­sure the envi­ron­men­tal foot­print and which only reflects the neg­a­tive impact of the life cycle of olive oil, ignor­ing the impor­tant role that agri­cul­ture and olive groves play in the fight against cli­mate change.

According to the data pre­sented by the International Olive Council at the Climate Change Conference held in November in Marrakech, tech­ni­cians esti­mated that the life cycle of one liter of olive oil, from when it’s pro­duced until it’s con­sumed, gen­er­ates 1.5 kilo­grams of car­bon diox­ide for each kilo­gram of oil pro­duced. The eco­la­bel projects are seen as a way to boost the European olive oil busi­ness as well as the envi­ron­ment.

• elEconomista


• SUR