Carbon footprint analysis of modern and traditional tempeh production in Indonesia

Analysis of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has been studied in modern and traditional tempeh industries in Indonesia. Rumah Tempe Indonesia (RTI), a modern tempeh industry, has unique process production compared to other traditional industries such as in Kedaung, South Tangerang, Indonesia, and has used modern equipment for processing tempeh. These characteristics affect the total of GHG emissions resulted in tempeh produced by RTI. The purpose of this study is to compare the total of GHG emissions resulted from tempeh production in RTI and traditional industry in Kedaung. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool used to estimate environmental impacts of a product or process. In our study we use an LCA method CML-IA baseline V3.01/World 2000 implemented in PC-tool SimaPro 8.0.1 (Pre 2016). The analysis result of GHG emissions impact represents that tempeh produced by traditional industry in Kedaung has lower GHG emissions than RTI does. We obtain that the total GHG emissions produced by tempeh in Kedaung and RTI are about 0.296 and 0.676 kg CO₂ eq/kg tempeh, respectively. This result may indicate that the traditional industry, which uses electrical energy for the boiling and splitting processes, produces lower GHG emissions than modern industry, which needs more electrical energy consumption for whole of process production. The largest CO₂ emissions in tempeh produced by Kedaung is generated from the tempeh processing, which reaches 98.17% of the total GHG emissions and the remaining substances are generated from electricity. We found that at RTI the tempeh processing also contributes 69.19 % for the total GHG emissions, while the rest come from untreated wastewater.