Life cycle assessment indicators

Analysis of the solid and liquid process waste streams clearly indicates that the MCC process offers environmental benefits compared with the chemical resolution procedure. To generate data for the cradle-to-grave emissions and impacts, a streamlined life cycle assessment of all of the processes was performed using the Fast Lifecycle Assessment for Synthetic Chemistry, FLASC . 

Biotech may be gaining importance in the food and nutrition sector, but many nutritional ingredients are still produced by chemical synthesis or via extraction for example, carotenoids are currently most competitively produced by chemical means. For vitamin B2, however, the situation has changed completely in the last five years. The traditional eight-step chemical synthesis has been replaced by one fermentation process. This biotech process, which is also practiced by BASF on a large scale, reduces overall cost by up to 40 percent and the overall environmental impact by 40 percent, as has been shown by detailed life cycle assessments. Similar trends have been described for other bio-based processes, indicating that economic and environmental benefits go hand in hand in today s white biotech practice (EuropaBio and McKinsey Company, 2003, DSM position document, 2004). 

Why is Life Cycle Assessment important 13) How can analytical techniques be used to follow the course of a reaction 14) What is the Toxics Release Inventory 15) What are green metrics Are mass and energy good enough indicators of environmental impact 16)... 

Pennington DW, Payet J, and Hauschild M (2004) Aquatic ecotoxicological indicators in life cycle assessment... 

The quantitative assessment of environmental impacts can be made using life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, which accounts for both inputs and emissions. LCA can be used to identify the major environmental impact categories and the sources of those impacts within a chemical processing plant. LCA can also be used to identify the major contributions to environmental impact within a product s life cycle. Impact scores derived from LCA can be used along with economic assessment scores and social indicators to provide indicators of overall sustainability of processes and products. Economic assessments are often limited through failure to account for all internal costs and especially the external costs associated with waste. 

Process design product stewardship is discussed in the CER, particularly in respect to life-cycle assessments for titanium tetrachloride and converting wastes to co-products for use in the food industry. There are also a number of examples that indicated that Tioxide improved processes to reduce environmental impact. These include ... 

Pennington, D.W., Margni, M., Payet, J., JoUiet, O., 2006. Risk and regulatory hazard-hased toxicological effect indicators in life-cycle assessment (LCA) (Jime 2006 hest HERA paper of year 2006 in Integrated Risk Assessment). Hiunan and Ecological Risk Assessment 12 (3), 450-475. 

Boesch ME, Hellweg S, Huijbregts MAJ, Frischknecht R. Applying cumulative exergy demand (CExD) indicators to the ecoinvent database. Int J Life Cycle Assess 2007 12(3) 181—90. 

Benoit C, Norris GA, Valdivia S, Ciroth A, Moberg A, Bos U, Prakash S, et al. The guidehnes for social life cycle assessment of products just in time IntJ Life Cycle Assess 2010 15(2) 156—63. Simoes M. Social key performance indicators — assessment in supply chains [Master thesis]. Lisboa, Portugal Instituto Superior Tecnico 2014. 

LCSA extends the environmental boundaries of traditional LCA in an attempt to incorporate the concept of sustainable development. It is defined as a method of addressing environmental, economic, and social sustainabiHty of a product system over its life cycle, indicated through the measurement of either positive or negative impacts [3]. LCA has been implemented through an integration of E-LCA, hfe cycle costing (LCC), and social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) [3]. Brief definitions of E-LCA, LCC, and S-LCA are described in Table 14.1. 

The ISO standard on Environmental Management fystems eoneems the Life Cycle Assessment of products and processes. ISO 14040 is the general framework for the specific standards ISO 14041, ° ISO 14042 and ISO 14043. These ISO standards are integrated, sinee 2006, by the general standard ISO 14044." This standard indicates the next phases to perform a LCA analysis ... 

Many studies also have been conducted on environmental costing in an organization or a supply chain (Roy et al. 2009). As Nikolopoulou and lerapetritou (2012) have mentioned, there are many systematic methods which can be used as environmental performance indicators of product and process such as product life cycle assessment (LCA) and minimal environmental impact. Letmathe and Boost (2000) proposed cause and effect analysis to assign environmental cost. Be Beer and Friend (2006) considered 5 types of costs including internal and external costs and also regarded environmental revenues. 

The system boundaries of an LCA may extend from cradle to gate, cradle to grave, or cradle to cradle. As depicted in Figure 26.1, cradle to gate implies that the life cycle assessment covers activities prior to the use phase, while cradle to grave includes the product s use and end of life. Cradle to cradle indicates a product that can be disposed of and returned back to the natural environment the life cycle of PLA can be considered as such because when PLA degrades, its carbon is recycled back into the environment for uptake by biomass. 

Although the value of multi-objective optimisation to environmental process design has been widely recognised, most of the applications only consider the process in isolation from its supply chain. The majority of approaches also use so-called burden or physical indicators based upon the mass of waste and emissions released instead of quantifying the potential environmental impact of pollutants. Within this context Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides a more holistic approach for quantifying environmental... 

Process design engineers should be concerned not only about the enviroiunental impacts that are directly generated in the designed process, but also consider the environmental impacts that are associated with the provision of the raw materials and services they specify as inputs to their processes. In recent years, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been given a lot of attention as an environmental indicator of chemical processes [24], LCA is a comprehensive technique that covers both upstream and downstream effects of the activity or product under examination, thus often being referred to as cradle-to-grave analysis [25]. 

---