Adopting life cycle assessment for various greenhouse typologies in multiple cropping environment in Australia

Over the last decades, dramatic population growth worldwide has been directly reflecting in food security. United Nations (UN) projects a world population will increase more than one billion people within the next years, reaching 8.5 billion in 2030. With this anticipated scenario, agricultural industry is experiencing monumental pressures and challenges in adopting and utilising cutting-edge technologies for both open field and controlled agriculture aiming for a sustainable and profitable food production per unit of area of plantation. This study focuses on the controlled agriculture or commonly referring to "greenhouses", which is broadly categorised under three main typologies: (1) low, (2) medium, and (3) high technologies. In general, adopting new materials lead to an increase for both durability and cost of greenhouse structures. Australian horticulture industry has set ambitious and new export targets that would lift export earnings by hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Australian conditions are very different to those that prevail under the northern European climate of the Netherlands, where technologies, associated management systems and accumulated experience were first developed. The study aims to investigate the environmental impacts of a common high technology greenhouse configuration in Australia, which encompasses various infrastructural and production components such as greenhouse structures, soilless cultivation systems, irrigation/fertigation systems, heating/cooling systems, and relevant production applications. The methodology is based on a critical literature review identifying the knowledge gap in Australia, as many studies have been focusing on individual crops in the northern hemisphere. Gaps in life cycle assessment applied to a variety of crops and in high technology greenhouses incorporating green components were identified.