The Water Footprint of the Wine Industry: Implementation of an Assessment Methodology and Application to a Case Study

Emanuele Bonamente, Flavio Scrucca, Francesco Asdrubali, Franco Cotana and Andrea Presciutti
Additional contact information
Emanuele Bonamente: CIRIAF—Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sull'Inquinamento e sull'Ambiente "M. Felli", Università degli Studi di Perugia, Via G. Duranti 67, 06125 Perugia, Italy
Flavio Scrucca: CIRIAF—Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sull'Inquinamento e sull'Ambiente "M. Felli", Università degli Studi di Perugia, Via G. Duranti 67, 06125 Perugia, Italy
Francesco Asdrubali: CIRIAF—Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sull'Inquinamento e sull'Ambiente "M. Felli", Università degli Studi di Perugia, Via G. Duranti 67, 06125 Perugia, Italy
Franco Cotana: CIRIAF—Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sull'Inquinamento e sull'Ambiente "M. Felli", Università degli Studi di Perugia, Via G. Duranti 67, 06125 Perugia, Italy
Andrea Presciutti: CIRIAF—Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sull'Inquinamento e sull'Ambiente "M. Felli", Università degli Studi di Perugia, Via G. Duranti 67, 06125 Perugia, Italy

Sustainability, 2015, vol. 7, issue 9, 1-19

Abstract: An original methodology for the Water Footprint Assessment (WFA) of a Product for the wine-making industry sector is presented, with a particular focus on the evaluation procedure of the grey water. Results obtained with the proposed methodology are also presented for an Italian case study. The product was analyzed using a life-cycle approach, with the aim of studying the water volumes of each phase according to the newly-released ISO 14046 international standard. The functional unit chosen in this study is the common 0.75 liter wine bottle. An in-house software ( V.I.V.A. ) was implemented with the goal of accounting for all the contributions in a cradle-to-grave approach. At this stage, however, minor water volumes associated with some foreground and background processes are not assessed. The evaluation procedure was applied to a case study and green , blue , and grey water volumes were computed. Primary data were collected for a red wine produced by an Umbrian wine-making company. Results are in accordance with global average water footprint values from literature, showing a total WF of 632.2 L/bottle, with the major contribution (98.3%) given by green water, and minor contributions (1.2% and 0.5%) given by grey and blue water, respectively. A particular effort was dedicated to the definition of an improved methodology for the assessment of the virtual water volume required to dilute the load of pollutants on the environment below some reference level (Grey WF). The improved methodology was elaborated to assure the completeness of the water footprint assessment and to overcome some limitations of the reference approach. As a result, the overall WF can increase up to 3% in the most conservative hypotheses.

Keywords: water footprint; wine industry; green water; blue water; grey water (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/9/12190/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/9/12190/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:7:y:2015:i:9:p:12190-12208:d:55209

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().