Towards a cleaner Mexican tortilla industry: a prospective life cycle assessment approach

One of the most prevailing foods in the Mexican diet is the tortilla. Annually, 56.7 and 79.5 kg of tortillas are consumed in urban and rural areas. The objective of this study is to evaluate the environmental impacts of tortillas from white (WM) and yellow maize (YM) consumed in the Monterrey Metropolitan Area (MMA) in northeastern Mexico, using a prospective life cycle assessment approach (LCA). Four different sources of maize were chosen according to their production importance. The life cycle inventory included the national and foreign agricultural production, transportation, and tortilla-processing plant modules. The premise python package and the Superstructure were used to transform the ecoinvent database v3.8 to the prospective approach using the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2 (SSP2). It was found that the production of 1 kg of tortillas from national YM and WT has a climate change indicator of 0.731 and 0.575 kg CO2 eq, respectively. Tortillas from foreign YM have up to 31% less climate change impact than the national WM. Maize agricultural production is the activity with the highest environmental impact, representing 65% of the environmental impact of the process. The contribution of electricity in the tortillas production system could be reduced from 22% to 4% if the energetic transition in Mexico follows the SSP2. This work provides the first approach to use the prospective LCA towards a cleaner production of the tortilla industry. The next step should be to develop fertilization reduction strategies with a prospective LCA approach.