Feed companies such as De Heus, Agrifirm, ForFarmers, and AB Agri, among others, have already joined the initiative. There are a raft of animal nutrition companies involved as well including DSM, BASF, and Evonik.
The GFLI legal entity was set up in September 2019 as a non-profit organization, under US law, by international feed industry associations: FEFAC, AFIA, ANAC, NSF, and the IFIF.
It was established with the goal of developing a publicly available Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) database to support meaningful environmental assessment of feed and animal nutrition products.
That database, with the underlying UN FAO LEAP-based methodology, aims to be the reference standard for assessing and benchmarking feed industry impact and improvement in LCA calculations.
GFLI membership, said ADM, will allow it to contribute to the development of the database to better understand the environmental impact of feed materials and, ultimately, help shape a more sustainable animal nutrition industry.
Mutual benefits
As a non-profit, the GFLI values additional members, as it means its secretariat can increasingly work on improving the institute and on guiding the development of the LCA database, said Laura Nobel, GFLI project coordinator.
Member companies, she told FeedNavigator, get to actively participate in GFLI through nominating a company representative to its Board of Directors and to its Technical Management Committee (TMC).
The Board is responsible for developing GFLI’s strategic goals, while the TMC focuses on the technical aspects of the GFLI database and provides input on the methodology, all directed at a harmonized LCA approach in the international feed industry, she said.
The GFLI secretariat also engages with the members on an individual level.
Membership fees support data generation and serve to accelerate the growth of the database, while member companies, using their network, help disseminate information about the GFLI, she said.
New datasets
Earlier this month, the Dutch and the UK former foodstuff processor associations, VIDO and UKFFPA, contributed new datasets to the GFLI database.
“When the GFLI database is updated early 2022, the datasets will be integrated into the GFLI database and available for download as part of the lifecycle inventory (LCI) and life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) formats,” said the organization.
