Livestock-Product Nitrogen-Footprint: a Fresh Method to Assess the Sustainability of Livestock Breeding

摘要

Nitrogen-footprint is a new method developed in recent years to measure the impact of reactive nitrogen produced by human activities on the environment. Livestock-product nitrogen-footprint, which is based on life cycle assessment theory (LCA) and nitrogen footprint, is used to define and measure the nitrogen emissions during various stages of livestock production process, and it aims to offer guidance for livestock producers to adopt rationale livestock breeding methods to reduce nitrogen footprint and further to promote the sustainable development of livestock industry. With different research scopes, livestock-product nitrogen-footprint can be used to measure the sustainable development of livestock industry from the following four dimensions: 1) to measure the ecological features of the livestock products; 2) to measure the ecological features of livestock breeding enterprises; 3) to measure the nitrogen footprint of the livestock breeding zone, 4) to exert the function of environmental protection education for consumers. It will shed some light on the further study of livestock nitrogen footprint.