Evaluation of environmental footprint of wheeled tractors

Abstract

Effective management of agricultural machinery helps to save financial and material resources, and also reduces environmental pollution. Traditional environmental impact assessment methods do not involve the life cycle analysis, so environmental footprint method can help to evaluate farming, identifying threats and measures of mitigation the negative impacts. Growing amount of tractors used in agricultural sector increase the negative impacts to environment, so it becomes important to properly assess farming. The aim of this paper is to determine the environmental footprint of wheeled tractors of Lithuanian farmers and agricultural companies and its development trends using sustainable process index method. The object of the research is the environmental footprint of wheeled tractors used for farming in Lithuania. Investigation showed that field works of tractors accounts the largest share of the total environmental footprint. Environmental footprint of tractors’ field works mainly depends from the type of fuel used which is directly dependent on the tractor's power and workload, consequently a change of fuel type, tractor type and work load can reduce environmental footprint of tractors.