The Parma Ham Consortium confirms its commitment to the environment and completes a multi-year project to support the ecological transition of its companies.
Launched in 2022, the project has set itself the goal of defining an environmental policy for the Parma Ham sector that serves its producers by optimising its sustainability performance.
To do this, the Parma PDO protection body involved highly qualified partners of recognised authority: the Politecnico di Milano for the definition and implementation phase of the project, its spin-off Enersem for the development of the software envisaged by the research, and CSQA for the verification aspects.
Over the course of more than two years, the project involved several distinct phases. At first, the environmental footprint of the Parma Ham sector was calculated through the application of the official PEF (Product Environmental Footprint) methodology, a tool made available by the European Commission to assess the environmental impact of production activities through specific indicators. This operation was made possible thanks to the involvement and active participation of a large number of companies in the sector and was subsequently validated by the CSQA Certification Body.
In light of the data processed and collected in this first phase, the Consortium was able to submit to the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security (MASE) the so-called Product Category Rules (PCR) valid for all PDO dry-cured hams, which define a reference environmental profile for this product category. This step was necessary to request the activation, for Parma Ham, of the Made Green in Italy scheme, the national certification scheme on product environmental footprint promoted by MASE, which was created to recognise, at the voluntary request of companies, Made in Italy products of high environmental quality.
In the last phase, software for calculating and reducing the environmental footprint was created and made available to companies in the Parma Ham sector, aimed at optimising the performance of the entire production cycle. Through this software, also verified by CSQA, producers who request it receive customised improvement indications for reducing their product environmental footprint and saving energy, as well as a report on their own environmental performance and comparison with comparable realities.
“The value of a product as unique as Parma Ham is also measured by its ability to show itself consistent with consumer needs and with the challenges of a rapidly changing world. The indissoluble bond that our PDO has with its territory makes us even more responsible with respect to the impact generated by our production, which is why we are particularly proud to have conducted this project together with the Politecnico di Milano, Enersem and CSQA. The main objective was to support our companies in their already substantial commitment to the ecological transition, thus strengthening environmental protection, for the future of the industry and for the new generations. What we note with great satisfaction is that a significant number of producers have already decided to use the software we have created with this project, confirming the environmental ethics of our sector, also to the benefit of its competitiveness on foreign markets in relation to these important issues”, comments Alessandro Utini, President of the Parma Ham Consortium.
“The collaboration with the Parma Ham Consortium in carrying out this research proved to be extremely significant. Projects of this nature, promoted by Consortia and organisations in the sector, are fundamental for accelerating the ecological transition envisaged by the European Green Deal. Relating to the needs of the manufacturing world allows the Politecnico di Milano to explore new avenues of research and to respond to the need for continuous innovation. Collaboration with the industrial world also allows us to support the vocation of territories and be a stimulus for their development, also and above all in terms of sustainability. We hope that this initiative can inspire other Consortia, encouraging concrete actions to achieve the ambitious and unavoidable decarbonisation goals”, Mauro Ceconello and Carlo Proserpio, project coordinators from the Politecnico di Milano, comment.
Matteo Zanchi, General Manager of Enersem, joins in: “We are particularly satisfied with the software created, the first ever designed for PDOs and developed specifically for Parma Ham. All companies in the sector now have a simpler path to obtain environmental certification, thanks to: the simplicity and speed with which companies can provide data and information on environmental performance; the union of PEF calculation and proposal of actions to reduce it; consistent and comparable analyses among all producers; a solid methodology and a series of rigorous and precise models”.
“EU legislation on environmental declarations,” says Marco Omodei Salè, CSQA Innovation Manager, “attributes an important role to the certification body. PEF, as a methodological tool promoted by the European Commission for the calculation of environmental impacts, verified by CSQA, represents the basis for the adoption by companies of the Made Green in Italy certification. The software for calculating environmental impacts – also verified by CSQA – represents the tool that the Consortium makes available to companies in the sector to facilitate the process of ecological transition also through voluntary certification”.
