The University of British Columbia

Purpose

The Sustainable Protein Production program undertook a collaborative project (SPP-121) with Dr. Nathan Pelletier (UBC) to develop a data management strategy capable of capturing and using Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) and Technology Development Matrix (TDM) approaches to efficiently enable Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) of standard plant protein fractionation technologies. The SPP-121 project was successful in developing a framework with a platform to assess environmental and economic sustainability aspects of pulse processing, including industry partner engagement and field data collection. Several gaps were identified including upstream data related to feedstocks and logistics, lack of social indicators assessment, multiplicity of data sources and formats, and technology data gaps across the whole value chain. Furthermore, the current lack and/or public availability of relevant data sets hinders deployment of both current sustainability assessment methods and advanced machine leaning techniques to both develop data gap filling techniques and to identify best-fit technology solutions to known sustainability challenges. These issues will be addressed as part of the new project proposed herein.