Uso de suelo y biomateriales

When designing a product made of biodegradable materials, all of the impacts associated with the product along its life cycle should be taken into account. Existing Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) studies of biopolymers have often neglected the land use impact category. Given that the organic fraction of biodegradable products often comes from agricultural waste, this category arises as an essential environmental issue due to the impacts of crops.Should biodegradable materials have great market success, it is possible that additional land would have to be transformed into crop fields, therefore causing environmental impacts from land use.A comparison of the several methodologies available to assess this impact is carried out in this study, using several data source. In order to illustrate the disparity among the existing methods, the impact caused by the substitution of a certain type of land for a one-hectare potato crop field was assessed. Two areas in Spain possessing different soil characteristics were chosen. These were the Mediterranean forests of the Iberian mountain group and the pastures of the north-western Cantabrian region.Results come to show that no reliable methodologies have yet been developed to assess land use.