# Accounting for Carbon Footprint Flows in Wine Production Process. Case Study in Spanish Winery
## 1 Introduction  
Over the years, sustainable development has become an increasingly relevant matter for companies, which need to find the right balance between being competitive, having a good corporate reputation and finding innovative ways to be more eco-efficient, extending their primarily economic goals to ecological and social goals [1]. As a consequence, efficient environmental management becomes a priority for companies, together with coping with the increasing interest of society in the ecological impact of companies. In this regard, the reduction in CO\({}_{2}\) emissions, as one of the main causes of Climate Change, has become a relevant topic for companies. As part of Environmental Management Assessment (EMA), the Material Flow Cost Accounting (FACA) approach can support companies in promoting environmental management and accounting systems that target a low-carbon economy [2]. Furthermore, its focus on the physical and monetary flows along the production activity allows to include the supply chain in the system, thus permitting to calculate the carbon footprint of the company and its products. The use of Material Flows Cost Accounting (MFCA) does also provide transparency and information for making decisions about the environmental impacts of the company [3], as well as better coordination and communication about energy usage in the organization [4]. As concluded by [PERSON] et al. [2], MPCA simultaneously supports the reduction in environmental impact and costs, while making it possible for the company to significantly reduce purchasing costs, as long as collaboration and understanding prevail between thecompany and its suppliers. The company developing MFCA may act as promoter and leader among its suppliers as well as an information intermediary between its customers and its suppliers [2; 5], introducing the idea of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). As part of the farming sector, the wine industry has a close relationship with the environment which has been addressed in many studies with different focuses [6; 7; 8; 9; 10], the carbon footprint measurement and labelling being one of the most important ones [11; 12; 13; 14; 15]. In most cases, the increase in production, quality and competitiveness undergone by the wine sector over the years has unfortunately been reached at the expense of reducing the sustainability of traditional production processes. Within the farming sector, emissions from industrial wastewater (calculated from activity data of dairy, swine, slaughterhouse, citric, sugar, and wine sectors), are supposed to increase by 58% from 2000 to 2030 [16]. Wine is no exception [17] since all the related activities require the provision of materials and energy [10] that contribute to resource depletion and a variety of environmental emissions [18]. In fact, the amount of energy and materials required for wine production has increased considerably due to the higher consumption of water and plant treatments in the vineyards, the enlarged amount of bottled wine, the limited use of returnable bottles, the widespread use of industrial cooling equipment and the intensification in transport costs from exports. On the other side, customers are gradually adding the environmental friendliness as a strong criterion when choosing their wine in the marketplace and many wineries are devoting efforts to a more eco-efficient production, making it necessary to design a system to measure and solve the potential problems [19]. At present, the wine sector is one of the industries under increasing pressure to adopt new approaches towards environmental assessment and the reporting of product-related greenhouse gas emissions [20; 21; 22]. Impacts on the regional economy have been subjected to analysis [23] as issues related to the wine sector sustainability [19; 22].