Methods for Life Cycle Assessment
Methodological development and application of LCA for the early-stage assessment of the environmental footprint of novel materials and processes
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a widely recognized methodology for the quantification of the environmental footprint of products, processes, and services. Its application to existing products and processes, retrospective by nature, has become consolidated practice following defined standards. However, the full potential of LCA to steer industry and society towards environmentally sound solutions is realized when the assessment of new products and technologies is performed ex-ante, i.e., in the earliest stages of development. In the materials and chemical engineering areas, such perspective application of LCA presents new challengers to practitioners, including: i) the need to model inventories of novel and emerging processes at low technology readiness level, which requires integration with process engineering expertise, and ii) the need to jointly evaluate safety and sustainability to avoid burden shifting between sources of environmental risk, which requires integration with safety engineering expertise.
The research activities carried out in this research area are aimed at:
- the definition and application of guidelines stemming from conceptual process design for the compilation of life cycle inventories of novel chemical processes in the framework of ex-ante LCA
- the integration of safety metrics, considering both occupational health and process safety, in life cycle impact assessment
- the incorporation of LCA in multi-criteria decision support frameworks for a full accounting of cross-media effects and risk-risk trade-offs in the deployment of technologies and infrastructures for the energy transition
- the close collaboration with partner research groups in the materials and chemical engineering fields to provide specific support to the R&D of novel materials and processes with robust LCA modelling including conceptual scale-up and uncertainty management
Research and Industrial projects on this topic address:
- Integrated safety and sustainability metrics for conceptual design of chemical processes