Potential decrease of ecological impact in greenhouse production of tomato by introducing renewable energy sources

Since the beginning of intensive vegetable production in greenhouses in the early 1960s, the sum of all activities connected with indoor production has profoundly influenced the ecosystem.
Nowadays, tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) production for fresh consumption is widely spread worldwide and in Slovenia, despite its high-temperature demands and requirements for installation of additional heating.
For this reason, estimating the global environmental impact is essential.
In our study, the sustainable process index (SPI) was used for estimating the ecological footprint, CO₂ emissions and global warming potential (GWP) of different heating systems used by local producers.
SPIonWeb^® software was implemented for estimating the potential decrease of all impacts by introducing alternative heating systems – geothermal energy and wooden chips.
The estimations obtained from this software indicated that fossil fuels might be successfully replaced by wooden chips in the PE tunnel and by geothermal energy in the glasshouses, respectively.
In that way, the ecological footprint might be reduced by 61.9% in PE production and up to 90% in a glasshouse.

VII South-Eastern Europe Symposium on Vegetables and Potatoes

D. Stajnko, M. Lakota, M. Bavec

heating systems, ecological footprint, sustainable process index

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2021.1326.16