Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/rser Environmental impacts modeling of Iranian peach production Amin Nikkhah a, ⁎ ,1 , Mahsa Royan a , Mehdi Khojastehpour a , Jacopo Bacenetti b a Department of Biosystems Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran b Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences – Production, Landscape, Agroenergy, Università degli Studi di Milano, via Giovanni Celoria 2, 20133 Milano, Italy ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Cradle-to-gate Environmental hotspot Impact category Life cycle assessment ABSTRACT The environmental hazard is a major concern in Iran. On the other hand, agriculture plays a key role in environmental impacts in this country, because this sector is both a producer and consumer of energy as well as it can increase or reduce the environmental impacts. Therefore, in this research the cradle to gate environmental impacts associated with Iranian peach production through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model is studied. According to the ISO 14040 standard, an LCA was carried out in four main steps included goal definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. In order to have better comparison, we also applied normalization and weighting indices. The results highlighted that the characterization indices of global warming, acidification, terrestrial eutrophication, depletion of fossil, phosphate and potash resources for one tonne of peach production were 172.16 kg CO 2 eq, 2.55 kg SO 2 eq, 5.68 kg NO x eq, 1058.51 MJ, 1.72 kg P 2 O 5 , 0.85 kg K 2 O, respectively. Farm gate to gate phase of production accounted for 61%, 83% and 97% of the global warming, acidification and eutrophication impact categories, respectively. So this shows that the agricultural sector of Iranian peach production (on-orchard emissions) has the greatest negative effect on the environment. The depletion of phosphate resources and followed by terrestrial eutrophication had the greatest negative effects on the environment among in different impact categories. To better environmental management of Iranian peach production, it is recommended to encourage the farmers to choose fertilizer with low environmental impact like bio-fertilizer or chemical fertilizer with lower environmental burdens respect to urea fertilizer. 1. Introduction The estimated world fossil fuel resources depletion times for oil, gas and coal are 2044, 2046 and 2116, respectively [40,51]. In this term, pay more attention to the agricultural sector is important. Because this sector is both a producer and consumer of energy as well as it can increase or reduce the environmental impacts [1,25,39,52]. It seems there are some methods that can help to mitigate the environmental consequences of agricultural production [27,50]. The most common environmental systems analysis tools are Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Environmental Auditing (EA), System of Economic and Environmental Accounting (SEEA), Material Flow Analysis (MFA), and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) [18]. A literature review illustrated that many researchers have reported the valuable application of LCA model in environmental management of agricultur- al production [15,32,38,4,45,7]. LCA can study the environmental impacts in different impact categories [2,5,42,30]. Global warming, acidification, terrestrial eutrophication, depletion of fossil, phosphate and potash resources are the main important impact categories considering by the agricultural sector [3,55,8]. These impact categories may influence directly to the environmental and human health such as global warming, acidification and eutrophication [17]. While, some impact categories including depletion of fossil resources, depletion of phosphate and potash resources are hazardous for future production [55]. LCA is one of the most used standardized methodologies to evaluate the environmental impacts associated with fruit production [59]. There have been some studies on LCA for fruit production [41,31]. For example, Mila iCanals et al. [34] performed an LCA of apple production related to New Zealand. They concluded that the application of LCA helped to identify improvement opportunities to reduce environmental burdens. Ingwersen [23] studied the environmental impacts of pine- apple production in Costa Rica through LCA methodology. The farming stage was reported as the most important source of negative environ- mental impacts. Keyes et al. [26] analyzed the environmental impacts of conventional and organic apple production in Canada using LCA and found that up to point of harvest, the combustion of diesel fuel, production and associated on-orchard emissions of fertilizers were http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2016.11.041 Received 5 January 2016; Received in revised form 23 September 2016; Accepted 4 November 2016 ⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: +98 51 38805838, Cell: +98-936-5619596. 1 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amin_Nikkhah, http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3008-2401. E-mail addresses: Amin.Nikkhah@mail.um.ac.ir, Farnood.nickhah@gmail.com (A. Nikkhah), Mkhpour@um.ac.ir (M. Khojastehpour), jacopo.bacenetti@unimi.it (J. Bacenetti). Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 75 (2017) 677–682 Available online 11 November 2016 1364-0321/ © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK