Beyond Grana Padano EDSS software and its possible applications in other dairy chains
The EDSS software developed by the LIFE TTGG project concerns the dairy production of cow milk, but the way the tool has been designed and developed makes it suitable to support environmental decisions (EDSS, in Italian SSDA) also for other production companies with high energy consumption.
First of all, let’s find out its working functions, EDSS is calibrated for each specific PDO product and is able to:
- estimate the environmental impact related to the production of raw milk and cheese
- compare it with the benchmark calculated on farms and associated dairies;
- compare it with the benchmark of the supply chain, reducing the time and costs of applying the LCA/PEF methodology to achieve environmental product certifications (e.g. Made Green in Italy);
suggest measures to reduce energy impact and costs, improving the environmental performance of each company and of the whole supply chain. In case of hard and semi-hard cheeses, we talk about farms, dairies, packaging plants; - provide and constantly update indicators for corporate sustainability reports;
- increase company competitiveness according to growing request for products with high environmental qualification;
- facilitate the social communication of companies and consortia on issues related to environmental sustainability: thanks to the software, all the consortium members have a shared and homogeneous tool, enabling the formulation of specific improvement strategies related to communication activities;
- monitor the results over time.
The widespread use of the EDSS tool by the consortium allows to monitor the progress of the environmental performance of the supply chain and to verify the effectiveness of the actions taken by individual companies in terms of reducing the environmental impact.
The expected results of the first years of use of the tool are:
- enable the software to environmental certifications according to the protocol Made Green in Italy (MGI);
- constant update of environmental impact databases;
- update benchmarks and performance indicators (KPIs);
- cloud software management and its update.
In the second half of 2022 the software will be released for Grana Padano members. From 2023 the EDSS will be accessible by subscription. Gradually, even consortia of other food chains will start to study their situations and will observe the creation of ad hoc software, able to support them instead of assembling only individual certifications and company reports.
Source: Enersem