Environmental Impacts of Energy Usage in Selected Tea Factories in Kenya

Objective: To assess the environmental impacts of various energy uses in Kenya tea factories to establish possible combinations for climate change mitigation. Tea industry provides livelihood for approximately 10% of the country’s total population but consumes considerable amount of energy during tea production and processing. The use of different energy sources in tea factories during processing causes different environmental impacts, which necessitates the search for environmentally friendly and sustainable energy source(s) through comparison of the environmental impacts of different energy sources. Few studies have assessed the combination of different energy use in tea factories or the use of modelling tools to explore environmental impacts. To this end, this paper assesses the environmental impacts of different energy usage by four tea factories in Kenya for a period of 5 years. Methods: The study used the life circle assessment (LCA) method for comparative evaluation of environmental impacts of electricity, biogas, solar, firewood and briquettes as the source of energy. Simapro 7.1 software was used for the analysis of the LCA with Eco-indicator 99 as the assessment method. The problem-oriented and damage-oriented impact categories of ReCiPe 2016 global scale