Life cycle assessment of buffalo manure management strategies: a case study of a farm in southern Italy

Introduction Buffalo livestock is a vital asset for the economy of the southern Italy regions. The increased number of buffalo farms which produce D.O.P mozzarella cheese raised concerns on the environmental impact of their manure management systems. Methods In this study, the environmental impacts of two different buffalo manure management systems, namely, the direct application of manure in the field (S1) and the use of manure for biogas production (S2), were evaluated using a comparative Life Cycle Assessment approach. The aim was to identify the system with the lower environmental impact and to provide recommendations to farmers for sustainable manure management practices. A gate-to-grave approach was used to define the system boundaries and the functional unit adopted was a ton of buffalo manure collected on-site. The primary data used were directly obtained from a buffalo farm located in southern Italy. Results and discussion The results demonstrated that the use of buffalo manure for energy production through biogas conversion reduced the global warming potential of 59%, acidification of 71%, and eutrophication of 51% compared to spreading it on agricultural land. However, the impacts of biogas production related to human toxicity increased due to the feedstock transportation and the inputs of the agricultural biomasses used in the anaerobic digestion plant. Substituting input crops such as triticale grains with wheat bran furtherly enhanced the environmental performance of S2. The analysis showed that S2 outperformed S1 in most categories and is to be considered the preferable choice for manure management in buffalo farms.