CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 57, 2017 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering Online at www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Sauro Pierucci, Jiří Jaromír Klemeš, Laura Piazza, Serafim Bakalis Copyright © 2017, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l. ISBN 978-88-95608- 48-8; ISSN 2283-9216 Environmental Analysis of a Mashed Tomato Production: an Italian Case Study Iolanda De Marco, Stefano Riemma*, Raffaele Iannone University of Salerno, Department of Industrial Engineering, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084, Fisciano (SA), Italy riemma@unisa.it The agri-food sector is one of the most impactful from the environmental point of view, due to resources depletion, land degradation and air emissions. Considering that, in the last years, consumers’ interest towards eco-friendly products is increasing, food industries aspire to reach more sustainable productions. In Italy, among vegetable crops that are processed and transformed in different derivatives, tomato ones are amongst the most commercialized. Mashed tomato represents about 50 % of packaged tomato marked volumes and, therefore, an environmental analysis of the emissions related to this production is a very timely topic. Therefore, the aim of this study is the analysis of the environmental performances of mashed tomato produced by a Southern Italy company using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, in order to select the most impacting phases and propose process changes to minimize the related emissions. The system boundaries were set from tomatoes’ transportation to the company up to mashed tomato packaging; therefore, they covered the industrial life-cycle stages, following a “from gate to gate” approach. Primary data were provided by the Italian company, whilst Ecoinvent database was used as source of secondary data; all data were, then, analysed using SimaPro 8.0.5 software, according to ISO 14040-14044, which is the reference standard for LCA. All the quantities related to materials, energy consumption and emissions to air, soil and water were reported to 500 g mashed tomato packaged in Tetra Pak as a reference product. The IMPACT 2002+ method was adopted to evaluate the effect of mashed tomato production on midpoint and endpoint categories. 1. Introduction In the last years, different research’s branches show interest in attainment of natural and environment friendly productions. Moreover, also consumers, knowing that their choices have an impact on ecological problems, tend to address their selections towards ecologically compatible products (Laroche et al., 2001). These considerations have to be made especially in sectors like the food one, which is among the most impactful for the environment (Guinée et al., 2006), due to production, preservation and distribution steps, which consume a considerable amount of energy (Roy et al., 2009). It is, thus, essential to evaluate the environmental impact and the utilization of resources in food production and distribution systems for sustainable consumption. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool for evaluating, in a quantitative way, environmental effects of a product, process, or activity throughout its life cycle or lifetime, which is known as a ‘from cradle to grave’ analysis (Reap et al., 2008). In order to perform deep analyses of a specific production, it is also possible to analyse part of the process, using a “from cradle to gate” (Andræ et al., 2004), “from gate to gate” (De Marco et al., 2015a) or “from gate to grave” (Rossi et al., 2015) approach. Different papers based on LCA analyses were published in different areas, such as, for example, energy (González-García et al., 2014), drug delivery systems (De Marco et al., 2016a), food products (De Marco et al., 2016b) and wines productions (Iannone et al., 2014). Among the products of the food industry, a great interest has been shown by Italian regions, which boast different harvested food products. For example, Pizzigallo et al. (2008) studied the life cycle of a wine farm in Tuscany, De Marco et al. (2016c) studied the life cycle of ale and lager beer productions in Southern Italy, Beccali et al. (2010) looked at the impact of citrus-based products in Sicily, Cellura et al. (2012) applied LCA methodology to evaluate the energy consumption and environmental burdens associated with the production