Life Cycle Assessment of Cockles (Anadara granosa) Farming: A Case Study in Malaysia

Life cycle assessment (LCA) was applied to evaluate the environmental performance of the cockle farming activity in Malaysia. The study was conducted by a mid-point approach following the ISO 14040 series of standard and CML-IA Baseline V3.01 method using SimaPro 8 software. A total of ten impact categories were selected namely abiotic depletion (ABD), global warming potential (GWP), ozone layer depletion (OLD), human toxicity (HT), freshwater ecotoxicity (FET), marine aquatic ecotoxicity (MET), terrestrial ecotoxicity (TET), photochemical oxidation (PO), acidification (ACD), and eutrophication (EUT). Capital goods dominate the impact of HT (82.20%), ABD (81.72%), EUT (81.36%), FET (79.3%), PO (79.02%), MET (75.06%), TET (59.8%), and GWP (53.15%). Operational goods dominate OLD at 80.24% and ACD at 53%. Fiberglass material dominated almost the entire environmental impact except for the eutrophication which was dominated by polypropylene. Harvesting process was identified as the main process contributed to the potential environmental impact in cockle farming. LCA is potentially expanded not only to the entire chain of cockle production, but also to put into practice other aquaculture systems in Malaysia.