Environmental evaluation by means of LCA regarding the ornamental nursery production in rose and sowbread greenhouse cultivation

This research has been carried out funded by EU project “Ecoflower Terlizzi” (LIFE04 ENV/IT/000480) with ISO standardization guidelines, with the participation of Italian ornamental growers and breeders, in order to gather information regarding the floricultural production process. The applications of LCA (life cycle assessment) methodology to greenhouse crops, point out the difficult to analyse an agricultural production with large use of energy, raw materials, structures and equipments, but also depending by the biology of vegetables, cultivation systems and the economic growers chooses. The evaluation of baby plants, in term of energy and materials consumptions, is the first step to realize an LCA analysis of whole productive cycle. At this aim, an LCI (life cycle inventory) was been realised near nursery farm in order to gathering production data of grafted baby plant of rose. The same search was carried out into a nursery farm that produces sowbread baby plants by F1 seedling. These two ornamental plants have been selected because representing the commercial typologies of cut flower and pot plant most growed in Terlizzi’s area, an ornamental greenhouse district in Apulia - Southern Italy. The informations about the production of baby plant have been collected in a database and processed by specific LCA software. Further investigations have been done in order to analyze and evaluate the fertilisers and pesticides used in the nursery. The results of LCA analysis have been expressed by means of the environmental burdens produced by energy, water, packaging, fertilisers and pesticides consumptions, structures and equipments, used in the production of baby plant. The results of this research point out that the environmental burdens of the production of baby plants are negligible in the rose production and considerable in the pot sowbread production principally because of the contributions of polystyrene plateaux and Polyvinylchloride plastic pot