Environmental impact of wine fermentation in steel and concrete tanks

Abstract

Wine industries commonly use concrete and stainless-steel tanks in fermentation, but the selection of a container depends on factors such as price, installation costs, requirements, maintenance costs, and monitorability. However, nowadays environmental protection trends seek to care for the environment along the entire value chain, consequently, making industries more responsible for managing aspects, such as pollutant emissions, resource consumption, and energy consumption. This paper reports a comparative cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment of the two most common types of containers for wine fermentation, i.e. stainless-steel tanks and concrete tanks. The present study estimates the environmental impact from building, installation, and dismantling of tanks to analyse the environmental impact from alcoholic fermentation and malolactic fermentation. Results indicate that building the tank e either out of concrete or stainless steel e has a high impact on the environment, for instance, in terms of global warming impact per liter of wine 6.03E-02 kg CO2 equivalent from steel tank or 1.31E-02 kg CO2 equivalent from concrete tank (ratio is 4.6). In addition, the building stage in a concrete tank has the highest environmental impact due to the concrete consumption and low recycling rate, while in stainless-steel tank, the fermentation stage is the highest environmental impact mainly due to direct CO2 emissions and because it has a high recycling rate.