ASSESSMENT OF TOFU CARBON FOOTPRINT IN BANYUMAS, INDONESIA - TOWARDS ‘GREENER’ TOFU

Abstrak / Ringkasan

Tofu is famous as an alternate protein source. Comparing to Beef and Chicken based products;
Tofu is indeed one of those promising foods which using less energy. Nevertheless it takes a lot of energy
to turn fresh soy beans into tofu. It includes energy used for draining, grinding, cooking, extracting the
soymilk, pressing the curd, cutting and wrapping the final products. To increase the love of tofu,
consumers in the era full with environment awareness need to be convinced that switching from others to
bean curd does help cutting back greenhouse gas emissions. The question is: how significant are those
numbers? Is it possible to reduce energy usage in tofu production without interfering its quality? This
research, conducted in one of tofu central productions in Indonesia, attempts to answer those questions.
Kalisari village, Banyumas is also known as tofu village, since producing tofu in traditional ways is the
main occupation of its residents. The objectives of the study are: (1) to investigate the overall energy
consumption and emission produced by tofu production process in Kalisari village, Banyumas, Indonesia,
(2) to compare those numbers with other soybean products as well as other protein sources and (3) to
come up with process improvements to reduce the tofu carbon footprint. Life Cycle Assessment
methodology (LCA) – a method commonly used to identify and calculate energy usage, natural resources
usage and amount of emissions to the environment - is applied to reach those objectives. This paper
depicts preliminary results of this on-going research.

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