Tracking carbon footprint in French vineyards: A DEA performance assessment Samah Jradi a, * , Tatiana Bouzdine Chameeva a , Bernard Delhomme b , Anicia Jaegler a, c a Center of Excellence Supply Chain and Wine & Spirits Academy, Kedge Business School, 680 Cours Liberation, 33405 Talence, France b Bordeaux Sciences Agro, 1, Cours du General de Gaulle, CS 40201, 33175 Gradignan Cedex, France c UMR CNRS 5600 EVS, Ecole Nationale des Mines de Saint - Etienne, Institut Henri Fayol, 158 Cours Fauriel, 42023 Saint-Etienne, France article info Article history: Received 8 January 2018 Received in revised form 23 April 2018 Accepted 24 April 2018 Available online 30 April 2018 Keywords: Sustainability Carbon footprint Performance efficiency Data envelopment analysis French wine abstract In recent years, companies have become increasingly concerned about environmental performance and the impact of their activity on the environment. Although the growing interest in sustainability, life-cycle assessment and carbon footprint analysis in literature is observed, there is still a lack of studies proposing evaluation methods to assess the performance efficiency of companies under these new constraints. Our article furthers our knowledge in the field by providing an in-depth investigation of the opera- tional performance of wine estates in the presence of composite indicators of carbon footprint. The calculated carbon footprint is related to vineyard practices with a major focus on pesticides, fertilizers and fuel use. We suggest in this article for the first time how to track the active ingredients in fertilizers and pesticides that contribute to carbon footprint. The methodology is based on an application of a classic radial model for an input-oriented minimization problem using data envelopment analysis. The proposed approach is applied to 38 wine producing companies in the Bordeaux region of France to estimate technical efficiency in the presence of carbon footprint. Research results show the percentage of carbon footprint contribution in average terms, from pesticides, fertilizers and fuel. Our results confirm that the carbon footprint effect in vineyards caused by the use of fuel is more than double the impact of pesticides and fertilizers. This strong vulnerability on fuel could do matter to factors guiding farmers' choice of vineyard practices. Additionally, clear improvement targets for the firms, which are inefficient in terms of labor force, net-fixed assets, and carbon footprint, are provided for enhancing their perfor- mance. We discuss managerial implications to be put in practice, and outline the suggestions for future studies. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Companies have become increasingly concerned about their environmental performance and the impact of their activities on the environment. The numerous environmental assessments are available nowadays. Life-cycle Assessment (LCA) which has existed for more than 30 years, and the carbon footprint of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission assessment, which is a recent subset of the LCA, are the two most common measurements ([JRC, 2007], [JRC, 2010]). LCA quantifies the environmental impacts associated with a prod- uct over its entire life cycle, from production of the raw materials to disposal at the end of life, and GHG assessment examines the contribution of any activity to global warming. A single unit of measurement is used in GHG analysis - a carbon dioxide equivalent (CO 2 e), and a single value is obtained. The wine industry (as well as other industries) is not innocent from contributing to climate change and global warming due to different vineyard practices namely, packaging, transportation, fermentation and energy consumption that result in carbon emis- sions and waste production ([Oreskes, 2004], [Thomas et al., 2004]). The analysis of carbon footprint per activity in the wine sector could help companies to identify “hot-spots” where emis- sions are highest in order to improve the current situation. This can be done by finding the best environmental practices implemented by companies in the sector and comparing other less performing companies to them. Despite the fact that International Organization for Vines and * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: samah.jradi@kedgebs.com (S. Jradi), tatiana.chameeva@ kedgebs.com (T.B. Chameeva), bernard.delhomme@agro-bordeaux.fr (B. Delhomme), anicia.jaegler@kedgebs.com (A. Jaegler). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.04.216 0959-6526/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production 192 (2018) 43e54