Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Climate-Smart Food Systems
Volume 8 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2024.1403580
This article is part of the Research Topic Vertical Farming: New Trends, Products, and Production Approaches View all 7 articles

Environmental life cycle assessment of an on-site modular cabinet vertical farm

Provisionally accepted
Michael Martin Michael Martin 1,2*Maria Bustamante Maria Bustamante 1Ilaria Zauli Ilaria Zauli 3Francesco Orsini Francesco Orsini 3
  • 1 Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 2 Swedish Environmental Research Institute (IVL), Stockholm, Sweden
  • 3 Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The number of vertical farms has been expanding rapidly in recent years to provide more resilient and sustainable global food provisioning closer to consumers. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on whether vertical farms can provide sustainable sourcing of food. The purpose of this study is to assess the environmental performance of a modular cabinet vertical farm producing lettuce and basil on-site at the end-user. To assess the environmental performance of this system, a life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted to determine the total impact of producing lettuce and basil on-site, i.e., a kitchen for an office cafeteria, and compare to conventional sourcing.The results from this study suggest that the modular vertical farm can provide crops with environmental impacts comparable to or less than conventionally sourced options. GHG emissions ranged from 0.78-1.18 kg CO2-eq per kg lettuce and from 1.45-2.12 kg CO2-eq per kg basil from on-site production. The ranges suggest that the environmental performance is sensitive to methodological choices and life cycle inventory (LCI) data choices. These include how to treat the infrastructure for the modular cabinet, as it is often rented as a growing-service system, in addition to the LCI data choices related to the source of electricity.In conclusion, under local conditions (i.e., Stockholm, Sweden) the modular vertical farm can produce lettuce with equivalent emissions and quality to imported lettuce, despite its high energy requirement. The findings and knowledge from this study add to the growing body of literature on vertical farming, providing empirical evidence on the sustainability of an on-site commercial cabinet-based vertical farm. Such information can be used for comparisons and validation of claims in the industry, and to provide empirical evidence to this developing field.

    Keywords: vertical farm, life cycle assessment (LCA), sustainability, Controlled environment agriculture, product service system

    Received: 19 Mar 2024; Accepted: 09 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Martin, Bustamante, Zauli and Orsini. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Michael Martin, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 100 44, Stockholm, Sweden

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.