Boosting Energy Transition of the Dairy Value Chain: a LIFE Project

The dairy sector faces several challenges, including economic instability, environmental concerns, and climate impacts, while striving to meet the EU’s Green Deal and Sustainable Development Goals. Nowadays, the sector contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from dairy cow breeding and energy-intensive processes. Yet, it is also vulnerable to climate change effects, including heat stress in livestock, reduced water availability, and declining soil fertility. The sector must focus on sustainability, resilience, and decarbonization to address these challenges. Key strategies include reducing production costs, improving resource efficiency, mitigating environmental impacts, and adopting energy-efficient technologies. Supply chain transparency, facilitated by open data sharing and strong collaborative partnerships, are critical complements to technological advances. These elements enable sustainable practice implementation, drive innovation, and ensure the dairy sector’s long-term viability. The LIFE-CET-2022-funded BETTED project aims to accelerate the dairy sector’s energy transition by fostering the adoption of renewable energy and energy-efficient measures like heat pumps for milk processing and dairy product production. Targeting small and medium enterprises, the project emphasizes capacity-building, investments in sustainable technologies, and reducing fossil fuel dependency, ensuring the sector’s economic and environmental viability. This study introduces a decision-support toolbox developed within the project and establishes comparable environmental benchmarks for dairy products. A comprehensive review of Life Cycle Assessment and Environmental Product Declaration studies was conducted, employing a consistent ‘cradle-to-grave’ approach to analyse key indicators such as Global Warming Potential. The benchmarks and the toolbox enhance accuracy and consistency in dairy sector environmental assessments, thus enabling informed stakeholder sustainability decisions.