Evaluating the environmental impact for lettuce production in vertical farming through LCA

Vertical farming represents a promising innovative solution to the challenges of sustainable food production, reducing land consumption and optimizing production. This agricultural system relies on vertical spaces and advanced technologies to grow plants in controlled environments, although it is typically associated with high energy consumption. However, to assess its actual environmental sustainability, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach is applied, enabling the evaluation of impacts across the entire life cycle, including production, energy use, transportation, and end-of-life stages. This study considers the LCA of a productive pilot site at the National Agriculture University of Athens, which has been used to produce Valerianella locusta and Lactuca sativa . The LCA analysis primarily takes into consideration and compares vertical farming to the open field production of Valerianella locusta and Lactuca sativa . Upscaling and improved scenarios of vertical farm production have been studied to evaluate the environmental impact trends of this technology based on specific set up variations also assessing the pros and cons of the production method. The study shows that, despite the high energy consumption for lighting and climate control of indoor production, vertical farming can outperform open-field production in several important environmental categories, depending on the crop-specific productivity. For Lactuca sativa , reductions in water consumption (−41%), marine eutrophication (−86%), freshwater ecotoxicity (−91%), and land use (−95%) compared to open-field production were observed primarily in the baseline scenario. However, freshwater eutrophication increased significantly (+425%) in the VF baseline scenario, mainly driven by upstream emissions associated with electricity production. Therefore, VF does not systematically outperform open-field systems across all impact categories. The situation is different for Valerianella locusta , which, due to lower crop yields, shows higher impacts, although these are comparable to those of lettuce under different energy supply choices and increased yields, with an unchanged system setup. The integration between vertical farming and LCA allows identifying optimization strategies, promoting technological and policy innovations that favor resilient and sustainable transition to sustainable urban agriculture.