The Tough Get Going: reduction of the Ambiental impact of the production processes
The LIFE TTGG – The Tough Get Going project (“The tough start playing,” where “tough” refers to the cheeses addressed by the project) was created to tackle a key challenge in the European dairy sector: reducing the environmental impact of production processes while maintaining competitiveness and efficiency.
The sector represents a fundamental component of the European economy in terms of employment and value generation, but it is also responsible for significant environmental pressures, including greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, eutrophication of water bodies, and land use.
In this context, the LIFE TTGG project focuses on hard and semi-hard PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) cheeses produced in Italy and France, with particular reference to Grana Padano, one of the flagship products of Made in Italy. The main objective is to improve supply chain efficiency and develop practical tools to measure and reduce the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) across the entire product life cycle.
Through collaboration among universities, start-ups, producers, training institutions, and research centres in Italy and France, the project developed advanced Life Cycle Analysis methodologies and created Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) datasets compliant with European standards.
These tools enable companies to simplify the calculation of environmental impacts, reducing time and costs and promoting wider adoption of environmental certification among producers, with the goal of improving production efficiency in the European cheese sector, reducing environmental impacts, and achieving more sustainable production and consumption.
| Project type: LIFE 16 ENV/IT/000225 Budget: 2’148’987 Euros (1’270’869 Euros founded by EU) Duration: 2017 –2022 Number and Partner involved: 7 project partners: Politecnico of Milan (POLIMI) – Coordinating beneficiary, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (UCSC), ENERSEM (Start-Up Innovativa), Grana Padano (GP-DOP), Centre National Interprofessionnel de l’Economie Laitière (CNIEL), The Organization for an International Geographical Indications Network (oriGIn), Fondazione Qualivita (FQ)) Role: Subcontractor Project site: www.lifettgg.eu |
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This multi-partner collaboration aimed to:
- apply Recommendation 2013/179/EU and the related rules to dairy production processes for assessing the environmental performance of two PDO cheeses across their entire life cycle;
- develop a dataset (LCI – Life Cycle Inventory) used by companies to simplify calculations and reduce time and costs in assessing the environmental impact of production processes and the life cycle of dairy products, in compliance with the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF);
- develop software to support environmental decision-making in the production processes of PDO cheeses (hard and semi-hard) from cow’s milk, aimed at assessing and reducing environmental impacts;
- apply Best Available Techniques (BAT) across the entire supply chain (using a “cradle-to-grave” approach) through the implementation of dedicated software to identify, describe, and evaluate, in real case studies, the environmental impact of the proposed technical solutions.
One of the key outcomes is the development of an Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS), a multilingual software (Italian, English, French, and Spanish) designed to support environmental decision-making in dairy production. The system was tested on a significant share of Grana Padano production and other French PDO cheeses, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying both environmental and economic improvement strategies along the entire supply chain.
THE ROLE OF TERRARIA
Within the project, TerrAria was responsible for the IT development of the Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS), an online calculator that enables the measurement of product environmental impact and supports the identification of the most effective mitigation measures. In particular, TerrAria focused on the software’s computational engine: data input and processing, front-end and back-end integration, and operational functionality. The result is an intuitive online calculator that allows companies to assess their environmental impact and identify the most effective actions to reduce it, thereby contributing to more sustainable and transparent dairy production.
