Metrics life cycle assessment

Tabone MD, Cregg JJ, Beckman EJ, Landis AE. Sustainability metrics life cycle assessment and green design in polymers. Environ Sci Technol 2010 44 (21) 8264-8269. 

Tabone, M. D., J. J. Cregg, E. J. Beckman, and A. E. Landis. 2010. Sustainability Metrics Life Cycle Assessment and Green Design in Polymers. Environ. Sci. TechnoL, 44(21), 8264-8269. 

Safety Considerations, Life Cycle Assessment and Green Metrics... 

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)... 

Table 2.4 Examples of life cycle inventory (LCI) and life cycle assessment (LCA) metrics.

The authors highlighted the importance of metrics in the subject of green chemistry by pointing out that (a) a set of metrics should be developed to address all 12 green chemistry principles, (b) such a set of metrics should be easy to apply, (c) the metrics should measure progress as well as point chemists in the green direction, (d) the metrics should inform and provide momentum for both chemists and corporate managers, and (e) sustainability metrics are valuable since they focus on life cycle assessment and are thus better able to capture a broad evaluation of sustainability. 

Life cycle assessment Risk and nanotoxicology Green chemistry (sustainability) metrics Consumer protection... 

Mass index (MI) is defined as the total mass used in a process/process step divided by the mass of product and it is approximately the E-factor plus one. A software package, the Environmental Assessment Tool for Organic Syntheses (EATOS), has been designed to calculate some of these metrics. More elaborate assessments such as life cycle assessment (LCA), could be performed, but this is also beyond the scope of this chapter. Our objective is to provide a preliminary assessment for the community to determine if further development of any guanidine organocatalysis is appropriate for use in green chemistry. 

Figure 13.5A Life cycle assessment metrics for 1 kg of ethylene using the thermal allocation method.

Figure 15.6 Example output of the process mass intensity and life cycle assessment tool developed by the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable. The data presented in the columns provide the metrics for steps 1,2, 3, and the total of the synthesis. Some of the instructions in the tool are included as an illustration.

Figure 2.3 Examples of Life Cycle Inventory and Assessment (LCI and LCIA) metrics.

The measure for assessing the sustainability of a process design should consider the complete manufacturing supply chain over the predictable plant life cycle. The metrics should be simple, understandable by a larger public, useful for decisionmaking agents, consistent and reproducible. The metrics described below [3] have... 

The aim of this case study is to illustrate the environmental impact assessment through a life cycle approach of HgnoceUulosic biorefineries, which are representative examples of multifunctional systems comprising various production lines. This example highlights the need to provide environmental performance metrics by allocating the total bio-refinery impacts to the biorefinery final products. This kind of allocation is particularly useful when a certain final product of interest can also be produced by alternative ways (i.e., other biomass- and fossil-based pathways) and, therefore, a comparison between these alternatives for the functional unit of 1 kg of product is required. In other words, in this case the focus is not on the utilization of 1 kg of biomass where the total biorefinery environmental performance would be of interest, but on a specific production path within the biorefinery production network, considering of course the joint or coproduction nature of the system. This allocation procedure (here the term allocation is... 

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