*2.4. Life Cycle Assessment*

The functional unit for the environmental assessment is 1 kg of fermented fungal product after the fermentation step. The selection of a mass unit was connected with the ability to compare results with those available in the literature. The system boundaries are cradle-to-gate as described in Section 2.1. The geographical scope is Sweden. The characterization method ReCiPe (ReCiPe 2016 v1.1 midpoint and endpoint methods, Hierarchist version) [32], was used due to its broad set of midpoint impact categories and the possibility of using both midpoint and endpoint methods [32].

The inventory was built using primary data flows from the laboratory experiments, which were initially based on data from the literature [28–30,33,34] and further developed based on the results from the trial experiments. The energy consumption of the equipment was estimated based on the methodology described in Piccinno et al. [35] for scaling up laboratory data. Capital goods are not included in the inventory, as all scenarios are expected to use similar equipment. The ecoinvent database version 3.6 was used for the background processes. Inventory data for the scenarios is available in Table 1.
