Evaluating Sustainability in Pork Production

The transformation toward sustainable food systems requires a comprehensive understanding of
the environmental, economic, social, and ethical implications of livestock production. Pork, as
one of the most consumed meats globally, exerts significant environmental pressures through
greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient losses, and land use. Conventional life cycle assessment pro
vides a robust framework for quantifying environmental impacts but fails to capture economic
viability, social consequences, and animal welfare—dimensions essential for holistic sustainabil
ity assessment. This dissertation addresses these gaps by developing and applying integrative
methods for evaluating and optimizing sustainability in the pork value chain.
The basis builds an environmental life cycle assessment of seven German case studies conducted
to identify hotspots across farming, slaughtering, and processing stages (Paper A). Results con
firm feed production as the dominant contributor to global warming, acidification, and eutrophi
cation, while slaughtering and processing impacts are primarily driven by energy use and waste
treatment. ... mehrScenario analyses reveal that targeted interventions, such as feed optimization and re
newable energy integration, can substantially reduce burdens. Extending environmental consid
erations, animal welfare is introduced as a quantifiable sustainability dimension (Paper B). Using
the analytic hierarchy process, expert judgments are employed to weight pre-selected animal wel
fare indicators, enabling the creation of an aggregated impact category for integration into life
cycle assessment. The findings highlight the importance of animal-centered indicators, such as
animal losses and fitness condition, for reliable animal welfare assessment. Merging all sustaina
bility dimensions, a multi-objective optimization model is developed to simultaneously address
environmental, economic, social, and animal welfare objectives within a pork supply chain net
work (Paper C). The model generates Pareto-efficient configurations, revealing synergies be
tween economic, environmental and animal welfare improvements and trade-offs with social ob
jectives such as affordability and employment. Complementing these analyses, an evaluation is
performed that encompasses a consideration of a possible substitution in terms of protein delivery
(Paper D). A comparative life cycle assessment evaluates pork against microbial protein as an
alternative protein source. Results indicate that mycoprotein significantly reduces land and water
use but entails higher energy demand, underscoring the potential for future improvements through
low-impact feedstocks and renewable energy integration.
Overall, this dissertation advances sustainability assessment by integrating animal welfare as a
quantifiable dimension into established frameworks and coupling them with optimization-based
decision support. Through the integration of environmental, economic, social, and ethical aspects
within a unified model, the research moves beyond descriptive assessments toward actionable,
preference-sensitive solutions. These innovations enable a more holistic evaluation of livestock
systems and provide a foundation for strategic decision-making that aligns sustainability objec
tives across stakeholders. Furthermore, the comparative analysis of pork and microbial protein
highlights forward-looking opportunities for diversifying protein supply chains, underscoring the
potential and the challenges for transformative developments beyond traditional livestock pro
duction.