Abstract
Recently, physical covers (such as nets, plastic films or sheets) have found a great application in several high-income fruit cultivations as insect and pest control systems. Agronomic and economic factors are of primary importance, but environmental impacts should be considered too, especially GHG emissions and the climate change potential. Within the project ALT.RAMEinBIO, which aims to find alternatives to copper use in organic agriculture, the carbon footprint (CF) of different cover typologies (mono-block net, single-row net and Keep In Touch®) have been analysed, throughout the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the CF of these covers, to identify which steps along the chain impacts more, and to work towards the development and promotion of strategies for reducing the CF of pest control operations in the organic apple production. Our results show that covers requiring high amounts of plastic and metal components generate inevitably high CF, up to about 1,513.4kgCO 2eq per hectare per year. Against our expectations, the CF of certain covers is even higher than the one of the actual insects and pests control practice, which implies the spraying of pesticides, the use of mating disruption and the installation of traditional hail-nets. ,Malus domestica Drosophila Suzukii,