The holiday is over. Family's still in town. Just sitting here doing some background literature review for a couple of projects I'm working on when I come across this: "Environmental analysis of beer production."
The concept of sustainable development is focused on the improvement of the quality of life, avoiding the unbalanced utilisation of natural resources. Several concepts have recently been developed to evaluate the use of resources and the environmental management from an individual to a global scope. One of them, Life Cycle Assessment, has been considered for the environmental analysis of a product of consumption: beer. The results of this study show that whereas beer production itself has been found to be accountable for a small portion of the environmental performance of the life cycle of beer, production and the manufacture of the packaging elements as well as the harvesting and transport of cereals are responsible for the largest percentage. Consequently, improvements have to be made regarding these aspects to achieve more respectful behaviour towards the environment.
I've been doing some reading on life cycle assessment over the past year. Here's my question when I read something like this "Consequently, improvements have to be made..." Why? I'm not saying there isn't a reason, it's just that far too often, people get too close to the subject and think that documentation of levels of environmental impact is a reason for action. That's one reason I like economics, it at least gives us benchmarks (efficiency?) to shoot for when making calls to action.
OK, back to the post holiday beer.
