Environmental and economic analysis of the organic and conventional extra-virgin olive oil

Olive oil represents a relevant productive sector in Puglia, since it stands for more than 50 percent of the whole Italian output and about 18 percent of the EU output. In the last years, the production of organic extra virgin olive oil has been steadily increasing due to new consumer behaviour and to the nutritional and healthiness quality of these products. In this paper the production systems of the conventional and organic extra-virgin olive oil have been compared, in order to assess their environmental and cost profiles, and to verify if the two dimensions, environmental performances and costs, go along the same direction. The methodologies used are the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the Life Cycle Costing (LCC). The results substantiate that the organic system has a better environmental profile compared to the conventional one, but scores worse in the cost profile if the external costs are not accounted for.