Product Chain Actors’ Potential for Greening the Product Life Cycle The Case of the Swedish Postfarm Milk Chain

The challenge in working with environmental improvementsis to select the action offering the most substantial progress.However, not all actions are open to all actors in a productchain. This study demonstrates how life cycle assessment(LCA) may be used with an actor perspective in the Swedishpostfarm milk chain. The potential measures were identified,applied by the dairy, retailer, and household, that gave themost environmental improvement in a life cycle perspective.Improved energy efficiency, more efficient transport patterns,reduced milk and product losses, and organic labeling wereinvestigated. Milk, yogurt and cheese were considered. AfterLCAs of the products were established, improvement potentialsof the actors were identified and quantified. The quantificationwas based mostly on literature studies but also onassumptions. Then the LCAs were recalculated to include theestimated improvement potential. To find the action with thegreatest potential, the environmental impacts of the modifiedand original LCAs were compared for each actor. No actionwas superior to any other from the dairy perspective, but reducedwastage lowered most impacts for all three products.For retailers, using less energy is the most efficient improvement.From the household perspective, reducing wastage givesunambiguously positive results. When households choose organicproducts, reductions in energy use and greenhouse gasesare even larger, but eutrophication increases. Overall, householdshave greatest potential for improvement while yogurt isthe product offering the most improvement potential