24 May 2016

Transparency in environmental impact of feed industry

Blonk Consultants is involved in a major new global development to contribute to enhance transparency and support development of innovations of animal products. In order to correctly measure the environmental impact of animal products such as meat, milk and eggs, developing an objective, harmonised LCA calculation method for the footprint of feed production is essential.

Freely accessible & transparent LCA database

Recently the major feed organisations in the world, FEFAC (Europe), AFIA (United States), ANAC (Canada) and the International Feed Industry Federation (IFIF), launched the Global Feed LCA Institute (GFLI). The aim of GFLI is to provide a freely accessible, transparent LCA (life cycle assessment) database of feed ingredients. This development will result in globally harmonised assessments and benchmarking of environmental footprint calculations of feed manufacturing. In order to ensure the database is compliant with methodological requirements, the GFLI has entered into a formal partnership with FAO (Food and Agricultural Organisation) and LEAP (Livestock Environmental Assessment Performance).

Involvement of Blonk Consultants

Blonk Consultants initially set up a carbon footprint database for feed materials together with Wageningen University. This carbon footprint database has been further developed to full environmental feed product data in Agri-footprint (LCA food database). This database will be the basis for a global further evolvement in the framework of GFLI. Besides that, Blonk Consultants is involved in designing the overall data infrastructure and the protocols of provision and reviewing new data of other regions in the GFLI LCA database. The planning is to have data of Europe, USA and Canada ready by November 2017.

The GFLI database is intended to become the central global source of LCI information for feed and will contribute to a sustainable future of the worldwide feed industry.


More information



Do you have questions about the GFLI Database?
Please contact Hans Blonk
Tel +31(0)182547808
E-mail hans@blonkconsultants.nl