Field Of Life Cycle Assessment Research Articles

Prior knowledge of the data on the production capacity of boron facilities in Turkey

The element boron is widely used in many industrial fields (semiconductor industry, glass industry, etc.). In order to assess the environmental impact of industrial products containing boron from cradle to grave, it is necessary to consider the impact of borate minerals on the environment. The literature on this subject is quite poor and the inventory of data on the life cycle of boron mining is very scarce. This article presents a synthesis of a literature review on this topic and provides easy access to important data on boron use and production capacities of Turkish boron facilities. The scope of Turkey has been chosen because the country has the largest deposits of borate ores in the world. The literature review is based on the analysis of sixty-three theses and fourteen reports in the fields of mining engineering, geology and earth sciences, environmental sciences, and chemical engineering. The production capacities from 1985 to 2016 (most recent data) and supporting data for each facility were studied using bibliometrics analysis. The data were then evaluated by calculating a data quality matrix, the coefficient of dispersion, and the standard deviations. We have found that the data compiled is generally of good quality. The values of the production capacities ±2.3 tons have 95% chance to be the real values of the production capacities of the boron industry in Turkey. The data obtained constitute a basis for enriching models in the field of life cycle assessment (LCA), sustainability, and/or material flow analysis (MFA) applied to borate mineral processing.

A literature review of eutrophication in Life Cycle Assessment. Relevance for pampean agroecosystems in Argentina

The tools that operate within the framework of life cycle thinking have acquired great relevance, since they make it possible to determine the environmental profile of the system being evaluated. One of the risks deriving from the various economic activities is the eutrophication of water bodies and soil, and these categories are considered in all Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) models. However, aquatic and terrestrial eutrophication is not yet exhaustively explored in the field of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in Argentina.
 A systematic analysis of specific national and international antecedents on these impact categories is carried out, focusing on terrestrial ecosystems, given the productive matrix and the advance of the agricultural frontier in the region. In the absence of research articles, it is deduced that there are no site-dependent characterizing factors (CFs) to evaluate environmental impacts in environmentally significant areas, given that there are no antecedents on the integrated analysis of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The methods and their models will be selected based on the one that best suits regional conditions, following the guidelines agreed upon at the Pellston Workshop 2018. This research can be further developed, continuing with the characterization of the ecosystems receiving the emissions. Argentina is currently considered one of the major agricultural regions of the world, with most activity centered in the Pampa region. The development of regional indicators for this region within the LCIA stage is of great relevance, since it will allow the quantification of environmental impacts derived from activities of great economic importance for the country, positioning itself as an advance in the study of environmental risks in the region.

Building national emission inventories for the energy sector: Implications for life cycle assessment and nations environmental footprinting

Environmentally-extended multi-region input-output (EE-MRIO) models allow calculating environmental impacts of goods and services in a supply-chain perspective. However, current EE-MRIO databases only have limited coverage of toxic pollutant emissions. This limited coverage is caused by the fact that public emission databases currently provide a rather modest pollutant coverage, are restricted to a limited number of countries, and lack differentiation in terms of sectors. This therefore calls for alternative data sources and inventorying techniques. Using the production of heat and electricity as a case study, we investigate the usability of available process-based inventories like the ecoinvent database from the field of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to build national emission inventories of pollutants. We thus develop the ecoinvent-based National Energy-related Emission (ENEE) inventory, comprising a total of 231 airborne emissions and 87 waterborne emissions of pollutants from heat and electricity power plants in 140 countries over the period 1995–2014. Using the improved data sets, we demonstrate that extending the coverage of pollutants beyond the few commonly-reported ones, like greenhouse gases, has a significant influence on the quantification of other important environmental impacts such as ionizing radiation and impacts of toxic substances to freshwater ecosystems. The ENEE inventory is an important first step towards building comprehensive inventories of pollutant emissions from power and heat generation, thus enabling more complete assessments of the energy sector. It also exemplifies the gains that can be made when introducing process-based data to complement public national and sectoral data for life cycle assessments and nations environmental footprinting.

Coupling attributional and consequential life cycle assessment: A matter of social responsibility

A long-running debate within the life cycle assessment literature concerns the appropriate uses for attributional and consequential forms of life cycle assessment. A recently published contribution to this debate suggests that social responsibility necessarily requires a consequential perspective, and that taking an attributional perspective is optional, but not necessary. The present paper critiques this suggestion by exploring two limitations with only taking a consequential perspective. First, consequential assessments are not additive, in the sense that when added they do not approximate to total aggregate environmental burdens. Second, consequential assessments are not suitable for creating an initial scope of responsibility, as the number of possible decisions available to an agent may be intractably large, and the notion of ‘role’ responsibility is not defined by specific decisions and consequences. This second limitation is derived from a previously identified parallel between attributional and consequential methods and the normative ethical theories of deontology and consequentialism. Based on the exploration of the two limitations, a coupled accounting solution is proposed which uses both consequential and attributional approaches for different but complementary purposes. The paper concludes by suggesting that although the debate on attributional versus consequential methods has occurred largely within the field of life cycle assessment, the proposed coupled accounting solution has broader applicability to other areas of social and environmental accounting.

Literature Reviews: Life Cycle Assessment in the Context of Product-Service Systems and the Textile Industry

As part of a broader project, which should answer the research question whether renting casual clothes provides ecological benefits compared to conventional consumption, two literature reviews have been conducted. The first one addresses the field of Life Cycle Assessment in the textile sector. The second study considers the literature regarding the Life Cycle Assessment of Product-Service Systems.We present findings on the dependence of LCA studies, lack of available data of chemicals, benefits from technological development in the field, the importance of the use phase of clothes and suggest further routes of research regarding user behavior and methodological development.

Data Quality Assessment of the Uncertainty Analysis Applied to the Greenhouse Gas Emissions of a Dairy Cow System

The results of an uncertainty analysis are achieved by the statistical information (standard error, type of probability distributions, and range of minimum and maximum) of the selected input parameters. However, there are limitations in identifying sufficient data samples for the selected input parameters for statistical information in the field of life cycle assessment (LCA). Therefore, there is a strong need for a consistent screening procedure to identify the input parameters for use in uncertainty analysis in the area of LCA. The conventional procedure for identifying input parameters for the uncertainty analysis method includes assessing the data quality using the pedigree method and the contribution analysis of the LCA results. This paper proposes a simplified procedure for ameliorating the existing data quality assessment method, which can lead to an efficient uncertainly analysis of LCA results. The proposed method has two salient features: (i) a simplified procedure based on contribution analysis followed by a data quality assessment for selecting the input parameters for the uncertainty analysis; and (ii) a quantitative data quality assessment method is proposed, based on the pedigree method, that adopts the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method and quality function deployment (QFD). The effects of the uncertainty of the selected input parameters on the LCA results were assessed using the Monte Carlo simulation method. A case study of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a dairy cow system was used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed procedure.

Regionalised life cycle assessment of pasta production in Iran: Damage to terrestrial ecosystems

The field of life cycle assessment (LCA) is moving towards the implementation of advanced damage models to assess specific areas of protection. The goal of this study was to quantify the main sources of terrestrial ecosystem damage from pasta production, based on a regionalised life cycle inventory and impact assessment. The impacts on terrestrial biodiversity caused by climate change, ecotoxicity, acidification, land use, photochemical ozone formation and water use were assessed for pasta production from durum wheat on 90 farms in Iran. The results showed that the agricultural stage was the main source of environmental damage in the life cycle of pasta production. Most variability between farms is caused by variation in the wheat yields. Climate change contribution, water use (for irrigation), and photochemical ozone formation were the main contributors to the impacts on terrestrial biodiversity. Climate change contribution was mainly due to carbon dioxide emissions from diesel fuel burning during agricultural operations. Nitrogen oxide emissions from nitrogen fertiliser production were the main contributor to photochemical ozone formation. Farmers can reduce their diesel use in field operations by combining tillage operations so that only one pass across the soil is required. Various innovative practices in irrigation, such as sprinkler irrigation, can result in higher yields which will lead to reduced environmental damage relating to water use.

Embodied carbon dioxide of network assets in a decarbonised electricity grid

Calculating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions associated with electricity is a key component in the field of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), but is often cited as challenging due to the complex nature of electricity systems despite its importance to the outcome. While calculating the operational CO2 emissions associated with electricity generation is an active research field, the embodied CO2 emissions, typically referred to as embodied carbon, of network assets has far less representation in the literature. This paper focuses on the CO2 emissions aspect of LCA to calculate the embodied CO2 of network assets in relation to the operational grid CO2 over time. Several functional units are defined: CO2 per operational year, CO2 per asset cost, CO2 per functional unit of electricity (kWh) and the relationship between embodied emissions and operational emissions in an electricity system over time. Hybrid functional units are then applied in order to better attribute the embodied carbon to the network functions. The hybrid functional units involve network asset lifetime and the issue of temporal horizons. Several suitable horizons are suggested and the comparison of results highlight the importance of the timeframe on results. The relationship between temporal horizons and environmental discounting is discussed and recommendations are made on the appropriate level of discounting depending on the temporal horizon and the purpose of the LCA. The paper uses data from the Great Britain electricity system where planned investment in network assets is £12bn at distribution level (Dx) and £16.4bn at transmission level (Tx) over the next eight years. By using GB network data for embodied carbon, demand and asset data, as well as data from the decarbonisation of electricity generation, indicative results are provided into the way in which embodied carbon impacts could change over time, showing that by 2035, the embodied carbon of the transmission network could contribute almost 25% of total emissions associated with electricity. On a regional basis, DNO level network assets could reach anywhere between 40% and 130%. This network data is also used to show that new network investment could account for up to 6.5% of DNO level network embodied carbon when front loaded during the RIIO-ED1 period.

A New Approach to Rank Several Multivariate Normal Populations with Application to Life Cycle Assessment

The need to establish the relative superiority of each treatment when compared to all the others, i.e., ordering the underlying populations according to some pre-specified criteria, often occurs in many applied research studies and technical/business problems. When populations are multivariate in nature, the problem may become quite difficult to deal with especially in case of small sample sizes or unreplicated designs. The purpose of this work is to propose a new approach for the problem of ranking several multivariate normal populations. It will be theoretically argued and numerically proved that our method controls the risk of false ranking classification under the hypothesis of population homogeneity while under the nonhomogeneity alternatives we expect that the true rank can be estimated with satisfactory accuracy, especially for the “best” populations. Our simulation study proved also that the method is robust in the case of moderate deviations from multivariate normality. Finally, an application to a real case study in the field of life cycle assessment is proposed to highlight the practical relevance of the proposed methodology.

Building and characterizing regional and global emission inventories of toxic pollutants.

To define consistent strategies for managing the environmental sustainability of chemicals, it is important to quantify the magnitude of their emissions and their associated impacts. Not all countries monitor and report emissions related to their activities. This is particularly the case for chemical emissions, whose toxic impacts on human health and ecosystems cannot be readily determined because of gaps in the available data. Emission data that can be retrieved from publicly available databases are typically restricted to a limited number of toxic substances, for a few countries, or for aggregated regions. Extrapolation strategies are thus needed to fill in those data gaps and to move from the consideration of single countries or regions to the world scale. Little is known about how effective these strategies are in extrapolating emissions. With the use of emission data available in public databases in the world, the current work explores different opportunities to compile representative inventories of toxic emissions. In this study, we build global and European emission inventories using three extrapolation proxies, namely the gross domestic product, the emissions of carbon dioxide, and the emissions of mercury. The three proxies are compared and their efficacies are tested statistically to identify the best performer for specific classes of substances. The potential impacts associated with the emissions in the European and global inventory are further tested by using an impact system adopted for the comparative assessment of chemicals in the field of life cycle assessment.

Life Cycle Assessment of Compact Fluorescent and Incandescent Lamps: Comparative Analysis

The estimates indicate that the energy consumption by lighting is 20-45% of a commercial building’s and 3-10% of an industrial plant’s total energy consumption. It is more reasonable to use energy efficient lamps such as compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), consuming only 20% electricity for the same light output compared with incandescent lamp. The aim of this work is to compare the CFL and incandescent lamp in the field of life cycle assessment (LCA). The methodological framework of all the LCA techniques is based on the ISO standards 14040-14043. The life cycle analysis is performed using the Gabi4 software in order to compare environmental impacts of the 15 W CFL and 60 W incandescent lamps providing similar amount of light (800-850 lumens). The functional unit is selected according to the operation time of 10.000 hours. All the materials, energy use and pollutant emissions to the environment from each process were analyzed. The environmental impact was estimated for the 6 environmental impact categories: potentials of Abiotic Depletion, Acidification, Eutrophication, Global Warming, Ozone Layer Depletion, Photochemical Ozone Creation. The results showed that during the operation period of 10,000 hours of each kind of lamp, the negative impact on the environment of the product is highest in the use phase due to electricity use. According to the analyzed environmental impact categories and from an environmental point of view the CFL is more appropriate source of light than incandescent bulb mainly because of their more efficient use of electricity and due to longer exploitation time.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.erem.61.3.2425

Life cycle inventory processes of the ArcelorMittal Poland (AMP) S.A. in Kraków, Poland—basic oxygen furnace steel production

The goal of this paper is to describe the life cycle inventory (LCI) approach to steel produced by ArcelorMittal’s Basic Oxygen Furnace (AMBOF) in Krakow, Poland. The present LCI is representative for the reference year 2005 by application of PN-EN ISO 14040:2009 (PN-EN ISO 2009). The system boundaries were labeled as gate-to-gate (covering a full chain process of steel production). The background input and output data from the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) steelmaking process has been inventoried as follows: pig iron, scrap, slag forming materials (CaO), ferroalloys, Al, carbon and graphite carburizer (material for carburization of steel), isolating powder, consumption of energy and fuels including natural gas, blast furnace gas and coke oven gas, electric energy, steam, air, oxygen, industrial water and heat, emission of air pollutants, waste, internal transport and land use. LCI steelmaking process was developed mainly on the basis of the following sources: site-specific measured or calculated data, study carried out by the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, AMP Environmental Impact Report, study carried out by the Faculty of Mining Surveying and Environmental Engineering of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, literature information and expert consultations. The functional unit (FU) is represented by 1,677,987 Mg of steel, produced by BOF steelmaking process. Time coverage is 2005. Operating parameters as well as air emissions associated with the BOF steelmaking process were presented. The production data (steel) was given. The emissions of SO2, NO2, CO, CH4, CO2, dust, heavy metals (Cr, Cd, Cu, Pb, Ni and Mn) and waste (slag and gas cleaning sludge) are the most important outcomes of the steel process. With regard to 1,677,987 Mg of steel produced by AMBOF, the consumption of natural gas, blast furnace gas and coke oven gas amounted to 10,671,997, 755,094 and 13,222,537.6 m3/year, respectively. Electric energy, steam, air, oxygen and heat input amounts were in the order of 45,003,611.3 kWh, 21,646.03 Mg, 107,592,526 m3, 90,611,298 m3 and 16,779.87 GJ, respectively. Direct emissions in air of SO2, NO2, dust, Cr, Cd, Cu, Pb, Ni, Mn, CO and CH4 from three converters (Nos. 1–3) were on the order of 28.966, 71.331, 752.05, 0.025, 0.024, 0.0216, 0.0156, 0.0163, 1.5694, 540.449 and 0.364 Mg, respectively. Total CO2 emission was 138,374 Mg. The amounts of slag and gas cleaning sludge were 276,709.64 and 16,749 Mg, respectively. The LCI study resulted in the development of a database with a vast inventory of data regarding steelmaking process in AMBOF referring to the year 2005. The output of the AMBOF LCI study is a set of gate-to-gate LCI data for steel production in BOF technology. This is the first tentative study to express steel production in Poland in terms of LCA/LCI in the steelmaking industry. The FU chosen for the present study is 1,677,987 Mg of steel produced in a classical BOF. The quality of data input in this LCI study is very good. The rules were used in accordance with ISO Standard for LCA. The methodological approach and boundaries that were made are transparent and fully documented. The purpose of this study is to help AMP authorities solve environmental and technical aspects as well as to train steel industry people in the field of life cycle assessment. In addition, this study can be extended to other processes involved in steelmaking route (via sintering plant/hot rolling plant). Moreover, these results move the LCI study on the steelmaking process one step forward. The LCI offers environmental information consisting of the list of environmental loads. The impact assessment phase aims to present more understandable results from the inventory analysis, and life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) will be the direction for future research. Another issue to discuss is the integration of LCA with risk assessment for industrial processes.

Complexity and integrated resource management: uncertainty in LCA

The International Environmental Modelling and Software Society organised the second international iEMSs Conference, held June 14-17 2004 in Osnabruck. The conference included research contributions from environmental modellers and software developers and users from a wide variety of disciplines, including the field of Life Cycle Assessment. Special emphasis was given to the analysis and modelling of complex human-technology-environment systems and the implications of complexity and uncertainty for management concepts and decision making. In this context, a session on 'Uncertainty in LCA' was organised focussing on tools to treat different types of uncertainty in an LCA decision-making context.

Life cycle analysis of a polyester garment

As part of a broader project, which should answer the research question whether renting casual clothes provides ecological benefits compared to conventional consumption, two literature reviews have been conducted. The first one addresses the field of Life Cycle Assessment in the textile sector. The second study considers the literature regarding the Life Cycle Assessment of Product-Service Systems.We present findings on the dependence of LCA studies, lack of available data of chemicals, benefits from technological development in the field, the importance of the use phase of clothes and suggest further routes of research regarding user behavior and methodological development.