Life-Cycle Study Used SANANBIO Plant Factory Data in Lettuce Climate Comparison
A 2024 Carbon Footprints paper identified an Anhui SANANBIO plant factory as a reference in a life-cycle comparison of indoor lettuce production and sunlight greenhouses.
According to a research article published in Carbon Footprints on May 31, 2024, researchers from Dalian University of Technology and Universitat Pompeu Fabra compared the modeled climate impacts of lettuce grown in an artificial-light plant factory and in a traditional sunlight greenhouse.
The study explicitly identified a plant factory owned by Anhui SANANBIO Biotechnology Co., Ltd. in Lu’an, Anhui Province. Its life-cycle modeling drew some foreground inputs from the company’s environmental impact report. Crucially, the researchers stated that electricity consumption data were not available in that report and therefore modeled electricity requirements using published investigations of plant factories in several countries.
The baseline scenario estimated much higher greenhouse-gas impacts per kilogram of lettuce for the modeled plant factory than for the modeled greenhouse under the assumed electricity mix. The paper then examined how electricity-grid decarbonization could affect those comparisons. These are the authors’ scenario-based results, not a measured emissions certification of SANANBIO’s actual facility.
The paper is relevant to commercial buyers evaluating both the opportunities and energy challenges of controlled-environment agriculture.
Original research: https://en.oaecdn.com/articles/cf.2023.53
Original report: Carbon Footprints · Source published: 2024-05-31
