Consequential Life Cycle Assessment of Mycoprotein as Meat Alternative in the EU Market: What are the environmental consequences of consuming more mycoprotein?

This study investigates the environmental consequences of supplying more mycoprotein, a meat alternative produced from fungi, into European markets using a consequential life cycle assessment approach. We first defined a cradle-to-gate system based on secondary data taken from available literature and database, and applied marginal data for electricity to the foreground systems. The initial system was eventually expanded to include other systems that are not physically related, but are expected to be affected through market forces. We assumed that additional supplies of mycoprotein in the EU market will substitute animal meat, the degree of which can vary greatly depending on the type of the product and/or market, and indirectly leads to the by-products substitution as well. To illustrate this, we first applied perfect-substitution assumption as the baseline scenario for each point of substitution being identified, i.e., pork, beef, chicken, manure, leather, milk, and oil. We subsequently applied different substitution rates, which are estimated based on the own- and cross-price elasticities of these commodities sourced from the literature, as part of the sensitivity analysis. The environmental impact categories considered include global warming, cumulative energy demand, land use, and water use, which are calculated using software-integrated methods. We expect that the net environmental consequences of supplying an additional one kg of mycoprotein will vary to some extent under the two different scenarios: (1) perfect-substitution assumption (2) empirically-based substitution. Furthermore, we believe that the perfect-substitution scenario will give minimum environmental consequences due to the profound benefits of avoided emissions from livestock system. In addition, it is more likely that the energy use and enteric fermentation would be central to the environmental trade-off as they are the major sources of climate-related emissions in mycoprotein and cattle systems, respectively. To sum up, we expect that mycoprotein as a meat alternative can contribute to food security with minimum adverse consequences, particularly because it requires much less land than comparable livestock farming.