Life cycle assessment (LCA) of palm oil in practice: the example of Malaysia Malaysian Palm Oil Board, Malaysia

Since the late 1990s there has been a widespread emergence of eco-labelling criteria and the Environmental Management System, which have extended to the agriculture products and processing sectors. Eco-labelling is slowly evolving to become a marketbased voluntary mechanism in the greening of the agriculture products supply chain. Ecolabel Type I is a voluntary third-party programme that awards a licence that authorizes the use of environmental labels on a product indicating its better environmental performance. Eco-label Type II is a self-declaration label on environmental performance, while Eco-label Type III specifically requires a life cycle assessment (LCA) study to be conducted on the product before certification. LCA is a tool for evaluating the environmental impact of a product or process throughout its entire life cycle (SETAC, 1993). It was first developed as a method for evaluating the impact of a product over its entire life cycle, the so-called ‘cradle-to-grave approach’, but it has since grown for use in evaluating the environmental impact of business activities, and finally of all the economic activities of a nation as well. Over the last decade there has been a rapid expansion in the demand for LCA studies to chart the environmental performance of products. LCAs have thus become a common environmental management tool and an analytical method for assessing and optimizing the environmental quality of a system over its whole life cycle (Stalmans et al., 1995).