Environmental schemes for the dairy sheep sector. Category rules for hard cheese from sheep milk developed within the Product Environmental Footprint EU initiative

Within the general debate and effort to improve agrifood systems sustainability, which resulted in the development of multiple frameworks, conceptual approaches and methods to capture the complexity of this challenge, environmental schemes for food products play a relevant role supporting the properly ecolabelling and reward of green products by the market (McLaren et al., 2021). In fact, the misleading communication of environmental performance causes asymmetric distribution of information that affect both producers, generating in addition economic barriers for accessing to competing labels and certification schemes, and consumers, which, often disoriented by the excess of environmental schemes and labels, tend to lose trust in these claims (Delmas and Burbano, 2011). Therefore, in 2013 the European Commission, with the Recommendation 2013/179/EC, launched the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) scheme, aimed to harmonize the assessment and communication of the environmental impacts of products using a life-cycle approach. Italy is a leading global agri-food products exporter, with Made in Italy, Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) labels recognized worldwide as high-quality standards with elevated reputation profile (Bonaiuto et al., 2021). This paper presents the elaboration process and main results of the product environmental footprint category rules (PEFCR) for the hard sheep milk cheeses, developed within the PEF scheme. In particular, the paper is focused on the preliminary PEF study (screening study) implemented on the Pecorino Romano PDO, which is considered the most representative product of the whole hard sheep milk cheese category. Pecorino Romano is a sheep milk cheese among the most exported in the world (Pirisi and Pes, 2011).