A study on ecolabeling and Life Cycle Assessment for food products in Indonesia: Potential application to improve the competitiveness of the tea industry

The increasing customer awareness and supporting regulation on environmentally-friendly products around the globe has fostered the need for revealing environmental performance information on their label, using an instrument called ecolabel. Ecolabeling system requires a life cycle consideration for the product, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) serves as a method to perform the assessment for the entire product's life cycle. In the field of food industry, specifically the tea industry, a 2014 report by International Institute for Sustainable Development showed a growing influence of ecolabel in the global market. Ecolabel and LCA become important tools for improving product competitiveness. Meanwhile, tea as one of Indonesia's main commodity has faced a challenging competition in the international market as indicated by decreasing export—despite increasing global demand—in recent year. This study reviews the ecolabeling system in Indonesia and LCA for food products. Furthermore, this study also investigates the potential application of ecolabel and LCA to improve the competitiveness of the tea industry. According to the study, the implementation of ecolabeling for tea still faces some challenging issues due to the supporting certification scheme and customer perspective. On the contrary, research on LCA for food products provides a promising application to improve tea product competitiveness. Therefore, this study recommended that, while educating people more toward ecolabeling, research on LCA should be continuously conducted to support the implementation of ecolabel in the long term.