Life cycle inventory and life cycle impact assessment datasets of PDO Feta production in Stymfalia region, Greece

Considering and reducing the environmental impacts has be-come one of the main concerns of agri-food systems. More specifically, the agri-food sector is increasingly confronted to the necessity of quantifying environmental impacts, e.g., to eco-design their products or to inform the consumers. Liter-ature shows a high variability in environmental impacts be-tween existing systems, as for example between cheeses and the necessity of more case studies to validate statements. In this context, this data paper provides some data related to Feta production in Greece, based on 8 farms of a coopera-tive (7 sheep livestock and one goat livestock). Feta cheese is PDO (Protected Designation of Origin), composed solely of goat's milk and sheep's milk under specific percentages (at least 70% sheep). More specifically, the data paper displays all the data used to obtain environmental impacts (calculated by using life cycle assessment (LCA)) of the production of Feta, from cradle to consumer. It includes the - sheep and goat - milk productions, the transformation into cheese, the packaging and the transport to wholesalers, then stores and then consumers. The raw data have mostly been obtained through interviews and surveys with the cheese and milk producers and complemented by literature. Data were used to build a life cycle inventory (LCI). For the milk produc-tion, the LCI was modeled using MEANS InOut software. For the whole LCI, Agribalyse 3.0 and Ecoinvent 3.8 were used as background databases, with modifications to reflect Greek context. The dataset also compiles the life cycle impact as-sessment (LCIA). The characterization method used is method EF3.0. This dataset participates in filling two gaps: (1) pro-viding data to represent the variability between Feta cheese production systems and (2) providing data linking impacts of farm, transformation, retail and transport in a value chain perspective. This is done by (1) enlarging the perimeter when most studies found in literature focus on one stage (e.g. the production of milk) and (2) applying LCA to data specific to a regional production (Stymfalia in Greece).(c) 2023 Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Automated summary

Considering and reducing the environmental impacts is a main concern in agri-food systems. This data paper provides data on the production of Feta cheese in Greece, filling research gaps and quantifying the environmental impacts of various stages in the value chain.