Life Cycle Assessment of a milk protein fractionation process: Contribution of the production and the cleaning stages at unit process level

International audience ; This paper aims at presenting a consistent Life Cycle assessment of the environmental impact of an industrialmilk protein fractionation process at the level of unit processes (gate to gate approach), focusing on the effectivecontribution of both the production and the cleaning steps. The precise assessment of the impact of cleaningstages could indeed constitute key issues for the optimisation and management of food plants. The results showthat the production phase accounts for approximately two-thirds of the environmental impact of the entire foodmanufacturing process, and the cleaning phase for more than 30% of the total impact. The latter is, however,underestimated due to methodological drawbacks and partly unavailable data. Among both the production andthe cleaning stages the most impacting unit processes are the membrane and the thermal operations mainly dueto the single-use of cleaning solutions and several temperature changes. Hence, for reduction of the overallenvironmental impact of the milk protein fractionation process it is advisable to primarily focus on improvementand optimisation of the microfiltration operation and secondly, on the thermal units.