The environmental performance of greenhouse versus open-field cherry production systems in China

Abstract Greenhouse farming increasingly has been adopted in China to provide off-season products because fruit and vegetable crops cannot be grown year-round. Compared with conventional open-field cultivation, however, greenhouse cultivation usually requires higher energy and material inputs for facility construction and interior heating, increasing the environmental burdens associated with product provision. Thus, the cradle-to-gate “time-environmental” trade-off of off-season products should be completely quantified to guide green consumption. In this study we employed the process-based life-cycle assessment modeling approach to estimate the environmental costs of greenhouse cherry cultivation and compared these costs with the impacts of open-field cultivation. We examined 10 impact categories, including the abiotic depletion of fossil fuel potential, global warming potential, acidification potential, eutrophication potential, ozone layer depletion, photochemical oxidation potential, fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity potential, marine aquatic ecotoxicity potential, terrestrial ecotoxicity potential, and human toxicity potential. The results show that the environmental impacts of greenhouse cherry cultivation are considerably higher (112.7% to 1672.5%) than those of open-field production, indicating significant environmental burdens associated with producing fresh cherries one to two months early. For greenhouse cherry production, interior heating was the hotspot in all impact categories, and fertilizer dominated the impacts of open-field cultivation. For greenhouse cherries, impact mitigation opportunities mainly were found in the adoption of cleaner heating fuel and animal manure use.