News milk
Weighing Kringloopwijzer in commercial hands
The environmental impact data (LCAs) for dairy farming, with which the data entered in the Kringgloopwijzer are weighed and with which the sector is assessed on environmental performance, have ended up in private hands. The result is that ZuivelNL, nor the dairy chain, no longer has control over it and has to pay for its use.
LCA data are also only included in the calculation for a limited number of feeds, fertilizers, energy and emission flows. Not all data is public. This is evident from data from ZuivelNL and Wageningen UR Boerenbusiness has realized. It is a striking situation.
The Cycle Guide and its substantiation took place at Wageningen UR, but Blonk Milieuadvies, fully owned by Merieux Nutrisciences since last year, has control over the LCA (life cycle analysis) data. This gives the company a dominant position, because the LCA (and therefore also what it looks like) indicates how harmful or environmentally friendly a particular product or group of products is.
'To compress'
In an email exchange seen by Boerenbusiness, employees of ZuivelNL and Wageningen UR say that it is 'a shame' that they now have to pay for the data and that not all data is public, but that does not seem to change much for the time being, they believe. ZuivelNL director Hubert Andela confirms this. According to him, payment was made for updated LCA data for the first time last year.
Undesirable, but...
Blonk also wanted to see money in 2022, but was refused and used data from a year earlier. At the insistence of the NZO, payment was made last year, because the dairy wanted to be able to show current data to customers. Payment was also deemed necessary to continue to provide WUR researchers with the latest data. However, it is not a desirable situation, says Andela. LCA data should be public and transparent, he believes. We are working on that now.
Several companies are also not happy with the current situation. Fertilizer and feed companies, but also energy producers, do not see their products included in Merieux's databases (because it determines what LCAs are used for and what they look like) and therefore feel disadvantaged. For example, they cannot demonstrate if their product is more sustainable than something else, because it does not have its own LCA weighting.
Lucrative
For Merieux Nutrisciences, drawing up and selling LCAs is a lucrative revenue model and guarantees rapid growth. The company was created from the merger of the French Merieux and the American Silliker. This combination is a data giant on the rise and has acquired many data companies in EU countries in recent years and is working hard to make all this data interchangeable. It also provides services to the European Commission. Merieux also has a partnership with dairy giant Danone.
Klaas van der Horst
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