The nitrogen footprint of food products in the European Union

Nitrogen is an essential element for plants and animals. Due to large inputs of mineral fertilizer crop yields and livestock production in Europe have strongly increased over the last 100 years, but as a consequence losses of reactive nitrogen to air, soil and water have intensified as well. We used two different models (CAPRI and MITERRA) to quantify the nitrogen flows in agriculture in the EU27, at country-level and for EU agriculture as a whole, differentiated into 12 main food categories. Here we show that the nitrogen footprint (NFP), being the total nitrogen losses to the environment per unit of product strongly varies between different food categories, with substantially higher values for livestock products and the highest values for beef (about 500 g N per kg of beef), as compared to vegetable products. Lowest NFP of about 2 g N per kg of product were calculated for sugar beet, fruits and vegetables, and potatoes. Amongst the losses of reactive nitrogen, nitrogen leaching and run-off and ammonia volatilisation dominated, with 83% and 88% due to consumption of livestock products. We also calculated the nitrogen investment factors (NIF), being the required quantity of new reactive nitrogen to produce one unit of nitrogen in the product, which varied between 1.2 kg for the consumption of pulses to 15-20 kg N (kg N in product)-1 for beef.

LEIP Adrian;  WEISS Franz;  LESSCHEN Jan Peter;  WESTHOEK H. J.; 

2014-12-19

CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS

JRC80923

0021-8596,   

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9446975&fileId=S0021859613000786,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC80923,   

10.1017/S0021859613000786,