The routes to convert CO2 into environmentally benign materials have attracted wide attentions. In this work, an emerging process to produce poly(butylene carbonate) (or PBC) from direct copolymerization of carbon dioxide and 1,4-butanediol is firstly simulated with analyses on the CO2 emission ratio (CO2-e, in kg-CO2/kg-PBC) and yearly unit manufacturing cost of product (YUMC, in USD/kg). In order to address the issues associated with large amount of solvents used in the lab scale, two proposed scenarios including the reduction of solvent amount, and heat integration by vapor recompression cycle (VRC) were simulated. It is found that CO2-e is reduced by 82.0% (from 30.06 to 5.42) when the solvent amount is reduced to 10%, and another 19.9% reduction in CO2-e (to 4.34) when applying the VRC. YUMCs are reduced by ca. 68% for both proposed scenarios (from 5.62 to ca. 1.8). The findings reported in this study may prove informative for developing CO2 conversion technologies from lab scale to industrial scale.