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Water footprint of wine production in wineries in Chile : The Creation of a Water Footprint Calculator

Maltha, R. (2015) Water footprint of wine production in wineries in Chile : The Creation of a Water Footprint Calculator.

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Abstract:Due to the increasing awareness of finite resources and the expected increase in world population both the media and consumers are increasing pressure to make products more sustainable. This causes companies to analyse their water use along the supply chain and take measures to improve water efficiency where necessary and/or possible. This is also true for wineries in Chile, especially wineries associated under the consortium Wines of Chile. This consortium prides itself with having sustainable products and started a project to research the water efficiency in vineyards and wineries. The research first focuses on gathering data of four different vineyards and wineries before having implemented any changes in protocols and equipment and the goal is to compare the results of this against the results of data gathered after implementing changes in protocols and equipment. This has led to the demand for the development of a calculator to determine the water efficiency for wineries. In this report you will find the findings of a research into developing a Water Footprint Calculator to provide for said demand. The objective of the research therefore was: “The Creation of a Water Footprint Calculator to be used in the main project”. To set up the calculator it was necessary to first make a clear truncation as to what to include and what not. The truncation was made such that the calculator only includes water use and water pollution in the wineries itself. Up next the governing theories and formulas were looked up that are necessary to transform the provided data into results. The Water Footprint Assessment Manual (2011) provided these and since in the truncation it was decided to only consider water use in the wineries. The Green Water Footprint could be left out. In other words, only the Blue and Grey Water Footprint were considered in setting up the calculator. Also, an assumptions was made about wine being the only output product in order to use the chain-summation approach as described in the Water Footprint Assessment Manual. The result of this research is a Water Footprint Calculator that successfully produces results from a given data input. The way data is inserted in the calculator is based on how and what data was provided by one of the consulting companies. The calculator was showed to two of the four wineries of which data was available during the research and their reaction was positive. The data of the four wineries was inserted in the calculator to see what the differences between them are. What was found was that there is a large differences between them. It is however hard to exactly tell how this difference is caused because not all wineries provided equally detailed data. After having set up the calculator and having the calculator produce results, the results were validated and the differences were explained. First, the validation showed some large deviations between the results that were produced by the company that provided the data and the results of the calculator. The differences were related to the Grey Water Footprint and could be explained. The reason for the deviation was the fact that the company that provided the data used different data, but also a slightly different calculation. The company calculated the Grey Water Footprint per month, and summed up the results for each month in a year whilst the calculator instantly calculates the result for a year. The deviations were however small except for one winery. It is important to bare in mind that the Water Footprint Calculator was set up and validated with data from four wineries only. Therefore the validation is not completely reliable. What is more is that the data that was provided is not consistent in the sense that one winery had a lot of flowmeters to measure the water (more accurately) whilst the others had comparably few flowmeters. Keeping these shortcomings in mind, it was concluded that a Water Footprint Calculator has been successfully set up and that the calculator has more features than it was possible to validate given the limited amount of data.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:ET: Engineering Technology
Subject:56 civil engineering
Programme:Civil Engineering BSc (56952)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/68791
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