The focus on climate action and environmental sustainability has grown amongst consumers and industries, making environmental sustainability for the potato industry not a wish to have, but an important factor to consider. To help the potato industry understand its environmental profile and identify opportunities for improvement, Lifecycles has partnered with Hort innovation to conduct a life cycle assessment (LCA) study.

This project aims to better understand and quantify the environmental impacts of the industry through an LCA. The information will advance the industry’s sustainability efforts, guide future strategic investments, meet consumer information demands to support market development and comply with new environmental reporting requirements.

The LCA study will include potato growing for seed, the fresh and processing markets. It will generate environmental indicators for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (carbon footprint), land use, water use (water footprint) and water scarcity impacts, and eutrophication potential. Together, this comprehensive set of indicators will provide a good picture of the main impacts and will help tackle hotspots, avoiding shifting problems from one impact category to another. 

The LCA will be conducted according to the International Standard for Life Cycle Assessment (ISO14044), which is the recognised method for quantifying environmental impacts over the life cycle of a product. The quantitative information it generates provides science-based data that decision-makers can use to substantiate sustainability initiatives.

The project will provide potato growers and their industry associations with i) an understanding of the nature, scale and significance of environmental impacts, ii) a recommended pathway for optimised reduction of impacts to inform the industry’s strategy, iii) quantitative metrics to track future mitigation efforts.

The work is being conducted over 24 months up to April 2027 by Lifecycles’ expert team of LCA practitioners with extensive knowledge in agriculture and sustainability practices. It is funded by Hort Innovation, using the Potato-fresh and processing-research and development levy and contributions from the Australian Government.

Hort Innovation is the grower-owned, not-for-profit research and development corporation for Australian horticulture.