Oskar Nyberg
About me
My PhD project is focusing on assessing parts of the methodology used in measuring sustainability of produce, more specifically in aquaculture.
Aquaculture shows great promise in supplying a growing global population with healthy food. However, many environmental issues are associated with aquaculture. The use of antibiotics in aquatic animal rearing schemes has been a growing concern due to the risks of accelerating the antimicrobial resistance development rate in human pathogenic bacteria, a rising problem to modern human healthcare.
Life cycle assessment (LCA; ISO 14040) is commonly used as a method for modelling the environmental effects of product chains, and the use to benchmark aquaculture operations using LCA is becoming more common. The LCA method will be assessed for its suitability to be used for modelling of environmental impacts by antimicrobials used in aquaculture.
However, although antimicrobial resistance development is voiced as a serious global concern, there is a lack of consensus in the scientific community how to assess the scale of impacts of AM use in aquaculture. The time-scale and geographical scale is of important consideration, as few local short-term risks can be identified with the use of AMs in aquaculture. However, the mechanisms of AMR development in aquatic environments, dispersion and interconnectedness with human food sources, are of long-term global concern.
Persons involved in this project:
Main supervisor: Michael Tedengren
Assistant supervisor: Prof. Nils Kautsky
Assistant supervisor: Dr. Patrik Henriksson
Publications
A selection from Stockholm University publication database
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Characterizing antibiotics in LCA-a review of current practices and proposed novel approaches for including resistance
2021. Oskar Nyberg (et al.). The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment
ArticleRead more about Characterizing antibiotics in LCA-a review of current practices and proposed novel approaches for including resistancePurpose: With antibiotic resistance (ABR) portrayed as an increasing burden to human health, this study reviews how and to what extent toxicological impacts from antibiotic use are included in LCAs and supplement this with two novel approaches to include ABR, a consequence of antibiotic use, into the LCA framework.
Methods: We review available LCA studies that deal with toxicological aspects of antibiotics to evaluate how these impacts from antibiotics have been characterized. Then, we present two novel approaches for including ABR-related impacts in life cycle impact assessments (LCIAs). The first approach characterizes the potential for ABR enrichment in the environmental compartment as a mid-point indicator, based on minimum selective concentrations for pathogenic bacteria. The second approach attributes human health impacts as an endpoint indictor, using quantitative relationships between the use of antibiotics and human well-being.
Results and discussion: Our findings show that no LCA study to date have accounted for impacts related to ABR. In response, we show that our novel mid-point indicator approach could address this by allowing ABR impacts to be characterized for environmental compartments. We also establish cause-effect pathways between antibiotic use, ABR, and human well-being that generate results which are comparable with USEtox and most endpoint impact assessment approaches for human toxicology.
Conclusions: Our proposed methods show that currently overlooked impacts from ABR enrichment in the environment could be captured within the LCA framework as a robust characterization methodology built around the established impact model USEtox. Substantial amounts of currently unavailable data are, however, needed to calculate emissions of antibiotics into the environment, to develop minimum selective concentrations for non-pathogenic bacteria, and to quantify potential human health impacts from AB use.
Show all publications by Oskar Nyberg at Stockholm University