Integration of life cycle assessment in the environmental information system

Background, aim, and scope  As the sustainability improvement becomes an essential business task of industry, a number of companies are adopting IT-based environmental information systems (EIS). Life cycle assessment (LCA), a tool to improve environmental friendliness of a product, can also be systemized as a part of the EIS. This paper presents a case of an environmental information system which is integrated with online LCA tool to produce sets of hybrid life cycle inventory and examine its usefulness in the field application of the environmental management. Main features  Samsung SDI Ltd., the producer of display panels, has launched an EIS called Sustainability Management Initiative System (SMIS). The system comprised modules of functions such as environmental management system (EMS), green procurement (GP), customer relation (e-VOC), eco-design, and LCA. The LCA module adopted the hybrid LCA methodology in the sense that it combines process LCA for the site processes and input–output (IO) LCA for upstream processes to produce cradle-to-gate LCA results. LCA results from the module are compared with results of other LCA studies made by the application of different methodologies. The advantages and application of the LCA system are also discussed in light of the electronics industry. Results and discussion  LCA can play a vital role in sustainability management by finding environmental burden of products in their life cycle. It is especially true in the case of the electronics industry, since the electronic products have some critical public concerns in the use and end-of-life phase. SMIS shows a method for hybrid LCA through online data communication with EMS and GP module. The integration of IT-based hybrid LCA in environmental information system was set to begin in January 2006. The advantage of the comparing and regular monitoring of the LCA value is that it improves the system completeness and increases the reliability of LCA. By comparing the hybrid LCA and process LCA in the cradle-to-gate stage, the gap between both methods of the 42-in. standard definition plasma display panel (PDP) ranges from 1% (acidification impact category) to −282% (abiotic resource depletion impact category), with an average gap of 68.63%. The gaps of the impact categories of acidification (AP), eutrophication (EP), and global warming (GWP) are relatively low (less than 10%). In the result of the comparative analysis, the strength of correlation of three impact categories (AP, EP, GWP) shows that it is reliable to use the hybrid LCA when assessing the environmental impacts of the PDP module. Hybrid LCA has its own risk on data accuracy. However, the risk is affordable when it comes to the comparative LCA among different models of similar product line of a company. In the results of 2 years of monitoring of 42-in. Standard definition PDP, the hybrid LCA score has been decreased by 30%. The system also efficiently shortens man-days for LCA study per product. This fact can facilitate the eco-design of the products and can give quick response to the customer's inquiry on the product's eco-profile. Even though there is the necessity for improvement of process data currently available, the hybrid LCA provides insight into the assessments of the eco-efficiency of the manufacturing process and the environmental impacts of a product. Conclusions and recommendations  As the environmental concerns of the industries increase, the need for environmental data management also increases. LCA shall be a core part of the environmental information system by which the environmental performances of products can be controlled. Hybrid type of LCA is effective in controlling the usual eco-profile of the products in a company. For an industry, in particular electronics, which imports a broad band of raw material and parts, hybrid LCA is more practicable than the classic LCA. Continuous efforts are needed to align input data and keep conformity, which reduces data uncertainty of the system.     

LCA of an Italian lager beer

Background, Aim and Scope  The increasing concern about environment protection and a broader awareness of the sustainable development issues cause more and more attention to be given to the environmental impacts of products through the different phases of their life cycle. Foods are definitely among the products whose overall environmental performance can be effectively investigated resorting to LCA. A LCA case study was performed in order to detect and quantify the environmental impacts deriving from the life cycle of a lager beer produced by an Italian small brewery, investigating and comparing two packaging options: beer in 20 L returnable stainless steel kegs and beer in 33 cL one way glass bottles. Materials and Methods  The investigated system included: production and acquisition of materials and energy, brewing process, packaging, transports, beer consumption and waste disposal. Data for the study were mostly collected from the Theresianer Brewery and completed on the basis of literature information. Data uncertainty was treated with a Monte Carlo analysis. Life Cycle Inventories were constructed for 1 L of beer in bottle and 1 L of beer in keg using the LCA software SimaPro and then assessed at the endpoint level according to the Eco-Indicator’99 method. Results  Inorganic emissions, land use and fossil fuel consumptions resulted to be the most critical environmental issues of both beer life cycles. Beer in keg turned out to cause a lower environmental load along its life cycle than bottled beer; this was mainly due to the higher emissions and the higher energy consumptions allocated to the glass bottles. Moreover, beer consumption phase, glass bottle production and barley cultivation were found to be the critical stages of the beer life cycle. Discussion  The brewing process did not result as a critical stage and therefore the company dimension may not be a crucial element for the overall impact quantification. On the contrary, beer consumption may have a significant impact mainly due to the consumer displacement. Conclusions  The analysis pointed out the relevance of the beer consumption phase and of the packaging choice within the beer life cycle and allowed to detect the other critical stages of the life cycle. It is worth to notice that producers and consumers can be active and responsible actors in pursuing the collective goal of the environmental sustainability. Recommendations and Perspectives  In order to improve the environmental performance of the beer life cycle, producers should set up marketing strategies in favour of reusable packaging and consumers should prefer draught beer and reduce car use. As beer consumption phase, bottle production and recycling and barley cultivation were found to be very significant stages of the life cycle of the beer, deepening the analysis of these aspects in similar studies is suggested. ESS-Submission Editor: Dr. Rolf Frischknecht (frischknecht@ecoinvent.org)     

A survey of unresolved problems in life cycle assessment

Background, aims, and scope  Life cycle assessment (LCA) stands as the pre-eminent tool for estimating environmental effects caused by products and processes from ‘cradle to grave’ or ‘cradle to cradle.’ It exists in multiple forms, claims a growing list of practitioners and remains a focus of continuing research. Despite its popularity and codification by organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, life cycle assessment is a tool in need of improvement. Multiple authors have written about its individual problems, but a unified treatment of the subject is lacking. The following literature survey gathers and explains issues, problems and problematic decisions currently limiting LCA’s impact assessment and interpretation phases. Main features  The review identifies 15 major problem areas and organizes them by the LCA phases in which each appears. This part of the review focuses on the latter eight problems. It is meant as a concise summary for practitioners interested in methodological limitations which might degrade the accuracy of their assessments. For new researchers, it provides an overview of pertinent problem areas toward which they might wish to direct their research efforts. Having identified and discussed LCA’s major problems, closing sections highlight the most critical problems and briefly propose research agendas meant to improve them. Results and discussion  Multiple problems occur in each of LCA’s four phases and reduce the accuracy of this tool. Considering problem severity and the adequacy of current solutions, six of the 15 discussed problems are of paramount importance. In LCA’s latter two phases, spatial variation and local environmental uniqueness are critical problems requiring particular attention. Data availability and quality are identified as critical problems affecting all four phases. Conclusions and recommendations  Observing that significant efforts by multiple researchers have not resulted in a single, agreed upon approach for the first three critical problems, development of LCA archetypes for functional unit definition, boundary selection and allocation is proposed. Further development of spatially explicit, dynamic modeling is recommended to ameliorate the problems of spatial variation and local environmental uniqueness. Finally, this paper echoes calls for peer-reviewed, standardized LCA inventory and impact databases, and it suggests the development of model bases. Both of these efforts would help alleviate persistent problems with data availability and quality.

Environmental assessment of yield improvements obtained by the use of the enzyme phospholipase in mozzarella cheese production

Background, aim and scope  Phospholipase is an enzyme which is able to increase the yield of cheese in, for instance, mozzarella production. Milk production is the most important source of environmental impacts in cheese production and it is obvious to assume that the milk saving that comes with the use of phospholipase reduces the overall environmental impacts of the final product. Production of industrial phospholipase is, however, also associated with environmental burdens and it is not known whether and to what extent the use of phospholipase is justified by overall environmental improvements. The aim of the present study is therefore to assess the environmental impacts that come with the use of industrial phospholipase in mozzarella production and compare with the savings that come with the avoided milk production. The study addresses mozzarella production in Denmark. Methods  LCA is used as analytical tool and environmental modelling is facilitated in SimaPro 7.1.8 LCA software. Yield improvements refer to full scale industrial application of phospholipase in cheese industry. The study is a comparative analysis and a marginal and market-oriented approach is taken. The study addresses contribution to global warming, acidification, nutrient enrichment, photochemical smog formation, energy consumption and use of agricultural land. Estimation of environmental impact potentials is based on Eco-indicator 95 v.2.1 equivalency factors. Toxicity is addressed by qualitative means. Results  The environmental impacts induced by phospholipase production are small compared with the savings obtained by reduced milk consumption for mozzarella production when all impact indicators are considered. Sensitivity analyses and data quality assessments indicate that this general outcome of the study is robust, although results at the more detailed level are the subject of much variation and uncertainty. Discussion  Transport of the enzyme from producer to mozzarella producer is insignificant and the general outcome of the study is considered applicable to other regions of the world where milk is produced in modern milk production systems. Conclusions  Use of phospholipase as a yield improvement factor is a means of reducing environmental impact of mozzarella production. Recommendations and perspectives  The total annual global warming mitigation potential of phospholipase used in production of mozzarella and other pasta filata products is in the order of 7 × 10⁸ kg CO₂ equivalents. The use of phospholipase is driven by overall cost savings and it is therefore recommended that the enzyme should be given attention as a cost-efficient means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.     

A survey of unresolved problems in life cycle assessment

Background, aims, and scope  Life cycle assessment (LCA) stands as the pre-eminent tool for estimating environmental effects caused by products and processes from ‘cradle to grave’ or ‘cradle to cradle.’ It exists in multiple forms, claims a growing list of practitioners, and remains a focus of continuing research. Despite its popularity and codification by organizations such as the International Organization for Standards and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, life cycle assessment is a tool in need of improvement. Multiple authors have written about its individual problems, but a unified treatment of the subject is lacking. The following literature survey gathers and explains issues, problems and problematic decisions currently limiting LCA’s goal and scope definition and life cycle inventory phases. Main features  The review identifies 15 major problem areas and organizes them by the LCA phases in which each appears. This part of the review focuses on the first 7 of these problems occurring during the goal and scope definition and life cycle inventory phases. It is meant as a concise summary for practitioners interested in methodological limitations which might degrade the accuracy of their assessments. For new researchers, it provides an overview of pertinent problem areas toward which they might wish to direct their research efforts. Results and discussion  Multiple problems occur in each of LCA’s four phases and reduce the accuracy of this tool. Considering problem severity and the adequacy of current solutions, six of the 15 discussed problems are of paramount importance. In LCA’s first two phases, functional unit definition, boundary selection, and allocation are critical problems requiring particular attention. Conclusions and recommendations  Problems encountered during goal and scope definition arise from decisions about inclusion and exclusion while those in inventory analysis involve flows and transformations. Foundational decisions about the basis of comparison (functional unit), bounds of the study, and physical relationships between included processes largely dictate the representativeness and, therefore, the value of an LCA. It is for this reason that problems in functional unit definition, boundary selection, and allocation are the most critical examined in the first part of this review.

Are future recycling benefits misleading? Prospective life cycle assessment of lithium-ion batteries

Life cycle assessment (LCA) quantifies the whole-life environmental impacts of products and is essential for helping policymakers and manufacturers transition toward sustainable practices. However, typical LCA estimates future recycling benefits as if it happens today. For long-lived products such as lithium-ion batteries, this may be misleading since there is a considerable time gap between production and recycling. To explore this temporal mismatch problem, we apply future electricity scenarios from an integrated assessment model—IMAGE—using “premise” in Brightway2 to conduct a prospective LCA (pLCA) on the global warming potential of six battery chemistries and four recycling routes. We find that by 2050, electricity decarbonization under an RCP2.6 scenario mitigates production impacts by 57%, so to reach zero-carbon batteries it is important to decarbonize upstream heat, fuels, and direct emissions. For the best battery recycling case, data for 2020 gives a net recycling benefit of −22 kg CO₂e kWh⁻¹ which reduces the net impact of production and recycling from 71 to 49 kg CO₂e kWh⁻¹. However, for recycling in 2040 with decarbonized electricity, net recycling benefits would be nearly 75% lower (−6 kg CO₂e kWh⁻¹), giving a net impact of 65 kg CO₂e kWh⁻¹. This is because materials recycled in the future substitute lower-impact processes due to expected electricity decarbonization. Hence, more focus should be placed on mitigating production impacts today instead of relying on future recycling. These findings demonstrate the importance of pLCA in tackling problems such as temporal mismatch that are difficult to capture in typical LCA.     

Life cycle assessment of automotive fuels: critical analysis and recommendations on the emissions inventory in the tank to wheels stage

Purpose  

As new alternative automotive fuels are being developed, life cycle assessment (LCA) is being used to assess the sustainability of these new options. A fuel LCA is commonly referred as a “Well To Wheels” analysis and calculates the environmental impacts of producing the fuel (the “Well To Tank” stage) and using it to move a car (the “Tank To Wheels” stage, TTW). The TTW environmental impacts are the main topic of this article.     

Exploring the use and impact of LCA-based information in corporate communications

Background, aim, and scope  The effective communication of corporate environmental messages has a history of mixed results and concerns remain around the quality and accurateness of these messages. Life cycle assessment (LCA) information is often presented as a promising informational tool, by which improved communication effectiveness of environmental/sustainable claims may materialize; however, the possibility of information overload has limited its application in marketing communication settings. The overall purpose of this research is to better understand how LCA-based environmental performance information might be effectively communicated in an advertising setting, the impact of such messages on individuals’ attitudes and behavioral intentions, and the mediating roles of informational complexity and credibility. Methods  Fictitious, but realistic, advertisements employing LCA-based information were created and tested empirically in two experimental settings. The first, in a business-to-consumer (B2C) setting, examines the influence of several environmental information contents, formats, and disclosures on attitudinal factors toward the ad, brand, and company, as well as behavioral intentions. Using hair shampoo as the product category, and the biodegradability capacity of its bottle as the environmental attribute, regression analyses were developed based on a sample of 3,292 subjects evaluating one of 12 different advertisements. The second experiment presented in this paper expands upon these ideas by focusing on a business-to-business (B2B) environment where the need for cognition, and thus the complexity threshold, is thought to be quite high and where environmental performance is expected to be of importance to the purchaser. This experimental setting includes responses from 1,062 architects and engineers—all of whom are members of the U.S. Green Building Council who evaluated one of eight different advertisements. In this experimental setting, the volume of LCA-based information is varied, while exploring the role of this information in conjunction with functional product performance messages. Results  Results indicate that LCA-based information can be effective within an advertising medium in enhancing message credibility, attitudes toward the brand and company, and positively influencing behavioral intentions toward purchasing, even though this information is viewed as complex and detrimental to attitudes toward the advertisement itself. More specifically, results from the first empirical experiment indicate that LCA-based communications make for more poorly reviewed advertising, but the credibility gained through explicit LCA-based environmental disclosures favorably influences the perceptions toward the company and the brand. These results are confirmed in the business-to-business experiment. Evidence from this study suggests that, within environmentally aware and sensitive recipients, advertisements with environmental messages are more effective than those presenting functional product benefits alone, but only when the messages are substantiated with elaborated LCA-based information. Discussion  Within the B2C respondents, we found that the perceived complexity of the ad in fact generated a significantly positive attitudinal response concerning the company under evaluation, which was not evident in the B2B study. The results suggest that the end-use consumers in the first experiment more often processed the ad through the peripheral route of persuasion, where the downside risk of presenting complex and detailed environmental information is significant (i.e. people won’t pay attention to the ad), but can be balanced (or even surpassed) by positive associations with presenting additional information (i.e. the company must be strong if it is willing to fully disclose all of this information). Conclusions  The influence of perceived complexity of LCA-based advertisements does not appear to negatively influence most measures typically used to assess advertising effectiveness; however, the appeal of the advertisement itself is significantly negatively impacted by increases in complexity. The credibility gained through more elaborated LCA-based environmental messages, to a high extent, compensates the effect of complexity on the attitude toward the appeal of the ad itself. In fact, this credibility strongly influences in a positive manner the attitudes buyers have toward the ad, the brand, the company, and their intention to purchase the product under evaluation. Recommendations and perspectives  Practitioners are to reconsider the position that simple and appealing advertisements are most effective to an overall marketing communication strategy addressing environmental performance. Simple messages are often required to gain market awareness and break through the noisy hypermedia marketplace; however, our results suggest that a firm’s ability to gain credibility in its message can compensate for many of the negative effects of highly complex messages. Researchers and LCA professionals influencing methodologies and implementation of LCA at the product level should recognize the potential use of selected and incomplete LCA-based information by firms in marketing communications. While strategic differentiation benefits associated with effective communication of environmental performance may lead to increased use of LCA techniques by firms, appropriate development of standards and certifications may be required to preserve perceptions of objectivity and transparency associated with LCA methodologies. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Assessing potential desertification environmental impact in life cycle assessment

Background, aim and scope  

Life cycle assessment (LCA) enables the objective assessment of global environmental burdens associated with the life cycle of a product or a production system. One of the main weaknesses of LCA is that, as yet, there is no scientific agreement on the assessment methods for land-use related impacts, which results in either the exclusion or the lack of assessment of local environmental impacts related to land use. The inclusion of the desertification impact in LCA studies of any human activity can be important in high-desertification risk regions.     

Occupational health impacts: offshore crane lifts in life cycle assessment

Background, Aim, and Scope  The identification and assessment of environmental tradeoffs is a strongpoint of life cycle assessment (LCA). A tradeoff made in many product systems is the exchange of potential for occupational accidents with the additional use of energy and materials. Net benefits of safety measures with respect to human health are best illustrated if the consequences avoided and health impacts induced by additional emissions are assessed using commensurable metrics. Our aim is to develop a human health impact indicator for offshore crane lifts. Crane lifts are a major cause of accidents on offshore oil and gas (O & G) rigs, and health impacts from crane lift accidents should be included in comparative LCA of O & G technologies if the alternatives differ in the use of crane lifts. Materials and methods  Accident records for mobile offshore petroleum installations were used to develop an empirical occupational health indicator for crane lifts in LCA. Probabilistic parameters were introduced in the procedure, and results were calculated by Monte Carlo simulation. The disability adjusted life years (DALY) framework was used to classify health outcome. The characterization factor for offshore crane lifts was applied in three comparisons to evaluate the significance of crane lifts to human health impacts from drilling technology. Results  The mean occupational health impact per crane lift was 4.5∙10⁻⁶ DALY, with cumulative percentiles {P _2.5, P ₅₀, P _97.5} = {6.0∙10⁻⁷, 3.1∙10⁻⁶, 1.7∙10⁻⁵}. Analogously, the fatal accident frequency was described by {P _2.5, P ₅₀, P _97.5} = {7.6∙10⁻⁹, 3.9∙10⁻⁸, 2.0∙10⁻⁷}, with mean 5.6∙10⁻⁸ lives lost per crane lift. Discussion  The uncertainty in the results is caused mainly by the random nature of accidents, i.e., variability in accident frequency. Applications of the characterization factor indicate that although crane lifts may not be significant to the overall health impact of the life cycle of drilling fluids, they are important to the occupational safety of employees on offshore drilling rigs and contribute significantly to the life cycle health impact of loading technologies used to transport drilling waste to shore. A comparative LCA of technologies for loading and off-loading drilling wastes shows that a recently developed hydraulic system performs better than the traditional crane lift alternative in terms of human health impacts. Conclusions  With the availability of statistics to assess the risk of single mechanical operations, safety aspects may well be included in LCA. For the case of offshore crane lifts, the uncertainty in the characterization factor compares favorably to what is indicated for other human health impact chains. In further work of quantifying occupational health impacts in DALY using accident statistics, it is advised to see if records of non-recoverable injuries (fatalities and amputation cases) can be used to simplify the damage assessment procedure as recoverable injuries were insignificant to the total burden from crane accidents. Recommendations and perspectives  The characterization factor for crane lifts identifies contributions to life cycle health impact from loading technologies that otherwise would have been overlooked in LCA. While many contest the inclusion of occupational accidents in LCA, our results show that such impacts can be included and that their consideration adds valuable insights.     

Gone…but not away—addressing the problem of long-term impacts from landfills in LCA

Background, aim and scope  Land filling of materials with content of toxic metals or highly persistent organic compounds has posed a problem for life cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners for many years. The slow release from the landfill entails a dilution in time, which is dramatic compared to other emissions occurring in the life cycle, and with its focus on the emitted mass, LCA is poorly equipped to handle this difference. As a consequence, the long-term emissions from landfills occurring over thousands of years are often disregarded, which is unacceptable to many stakeholders considering the quantities of toxic substances that can be present. On the other hand, inclusion of all future emissions (over thousands of years) in the inventories potentially dominates all other impacts from the product system. The paper aims to present a pragmatic approach to address this dilemma. Materials and methods  Two new impact categories are introduced representing the stored ecotoxicity and stored human toxicity of the contaminants remaining in the landfill after a ‘foreseeable’ time period of 100 years. The impact scores are calculated using the normal characterisation factors for the ecotoxicity and human toxicity impact categories, and they represent the toxicity potentials of what remains in the landfill after 100 years (hence the term ‘stored’ (eco)toxicity). Normalisation references are developed for the stored toxicity categories based on Danish figures to support comparison with indicator scores for the conventional environmental impact categories. In contrast to the scores for the conventional impact categories, it is uncertain to what extent the stored toxicity scores represent emissions, which will occur at all. Guidance is given on how to reflect this uncertainty in the weighting and interpretation of the scores. Results and discussion  In landfills and road constructions used to deposit residuals from incinerators, less than 1% of the content of metals is leached within the first 100 years. The stored toxicity scores are therefore much higher than the conventional impact scores that represent the actual emissions. Several examples are given illustrating the use and potential significance of the stored toxicity categories. Conclusions and perspectives  The methodology to calculate stored human and ecotoxicity is a simple and pragmatic approach to address LCA’s problem of treating the slow long-term emissions at very low concentrations appropriately. The problem resides in the inventory analysis and the impact assessment, and the methodology circumvents the problem by converting it into a weighting and interpretation issue accommodating the value-based discussion of how to weight potential effects in the far future. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Life cycle assessment of fuel ethanol from cassava in Thailand

Goal and Scope  A well-to-wheel analysis has been conducted for cassava-based ethanol (CE) in Thailand. The aim of the analysis is to assess the potentials of CE in the form of gasohol E10 for promoting energy security and reducing environmental impacts in comparison with conventional gasoline (CG). Method  In the LCA procedure, three separate but interrelated components: inventory analysis, characterization and interpretation were performed for the complete chain of the fuel life cycle. To compare gasohol E10 and CG, this study addressed their impact potentials per gasoline-equivalent litre, taking into account the performance difference between gasohol and gasoline in an explosion motor. Results and Discussions  The results obtained show that CE in the form of E10, along its whole life cycle, reduces certain environmental loads compared to CG. The percentage reductions relative to CG are 6.1% for fossil energy use, 6.0% for global warming potential, 6.8% for acidification, and 12.2% for nutrient enrichment. Using biomass in place of fossil fuels for process energy in the manufacture of ethanol leads to improved overall life cycle energy and environmental performance of ethanol blends relative to CG. Conclusions and Outlook  The LCA brings to light the key areas in the ethanol production cycle that researchers and technicians need to work on to maximize ethanol’s contribution to energy security and environmental sustainability ESS-Submission Editor: Mark Goedkoop (goedkoop@pre.nl)     

Recycling of EOL CRT glass into ceramic glaze formulations and its environmental impact by LCA approach

Background, Aims and Scope The interest in recycling materials at the end of their life is growing in the industry in general. As regards the Wastes of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), an appreciable increase of these materials has been noticed in the last decades, 117 · 10³ tons of WEEE have been produced in Italy in 2002 according to Ecohitech [1] and the increase in this kind of waste is three times higher than that of the municipal waste according to the FISE ASSOAMBIENTE report [2]. Within WEEE, End-of-Life Cathode Ray Tube (EOL CRT) glass, the main part of TV sets and PC monitors, is here analysed using both a technical approach to establish a possible reuse of the glass in a open-loop recycling field (ceramic industry) and a methodology (LCA) capable of providing environmental evaluations. Methods The technological characterization was performed by chemical resistance tests (UNI EN ISO 10545-13), staining tests (UNI EN ISO 10545-14) with blue methylene and potassium permanganate (KMnO₄), and surface abrasion tests (UNI EN ISO 10545-7). The LCA study was conducted using the SimaPro 5.0 software and Eco-Indicator 99 as an evaluation method. Results and Discussion The good technical results, reached by using cleaned EOL CRT panel glass inside a ceramic glaze formulation instead of a commercial frit, are supported by the environmental impact evaluation, which shows a decrease of the overall potential damage (measured in Points) of 36% and, in particular, a reduction of 53% in ‘Human health’, 31% in ‘Eco-system quality’ and 24% in ‘Resources’. Conclusions This study has demonstrated that this new, open-loop recycling strategy for the CRT glass significantly reduces the environmental impact of the ceramic glaze production process. In fact, in all damage categories examined in this study, there is a minor impact. An improvement is evident in the respiratory inorganics sub-category related to the lowering of dusts mainly and to a lesser amount with NO_x and SO_x in the climate change sub-category, due mainly to the reduction of CO₂ emission correlated to the avoided combustion of the mixture which feeds melting furnaces in the frit production. Thus, the damage decrease in ‘Ecosystem quality’ is prevalently due to the lower NO_x emissions by the kilns in the frit production that is evident in the acidification/eutrophication sub-category. Finally, the significant saving in the ‘Resource’ category is principally linked to the fossil fuels sub-category, thanks to the methane saving which stokes the melting furnaces. Perspectives Furthermore, the decrease in CO₂ emission (94.4%) evident in the climate change sub-category is a very important topic because it is in line with the Kyoto protocol (1997), where significant efforts have been exerted for the reduction of the green house gases emission, notably CO₂. The CO₂ emission is correlated to the combustion of the mixture which feeds melting kilns in the frit production, therefore the recycling of secondary raw materials, already in a glass state, can reduce the emissions of this gas. This reduction can be termed as environmental credit and it is an example of an allocation of environmental loads in a open-loop recycling, where waste from one industrial system are used as raw materials in another product system.     

Quantifying environmental impacts of primary aluminum ingot production and consumption : A trade‐linked multilevel life cycle assessment

Aluminum is one of the most used metals of modern civilization, but its production is responsible for multiple adverse environmental impacts mostly due to aluminum smelting and alumina refining. Previous life cycle assessments (LCAs) have aggregated alumina refining into a single global process even though refining processes are highly spatially differentiated and alumina is highly traded. Our work improves on existing LCAs of primary aluminum by including temporal and spatial differentiation in alumina refining and aluminum smelting and trade of alumina and primary aluminum ingots. We build country‐level impact factors for primary aluminum ingot production and consumption, with the spatial distributions of environmental impacts, from 2000 to 2017, by combining a trade‐linked multilevel material flow analysis with LCA using six midpoint categories of the ReCiPe method. Climate change impacts of primary aluminum production range from 4.5 to 33.6 kg CO₂ eq./kg. We then estimate the life cycle production‐ and consumption‐based environmental burdens of primary aluminum ingot by country. High spatial variations exist among impact factors of primary aluminum production. Aggregating the alumina refining processes into a single process may cause important deviations on the impact factors of primary aluminum ingot production (up to 38% differences in climate change impacts). Finally, we estimate the climate change impacts of worldwide primary aluminum production at 1.2 Gt CO₂ eq. in 2017 and untangle their spatial origins, localized at 70% in China. Overall, we show the importance of spatial differentiation for highly traded products that rely on highly traded inputs and offer recommendations for LCA practitioners. This article met the requirements for a gold‐gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges .     

Evaluating environmental impacts of selection for residual feed intake in pigs

To identify a proper strategy for future feed-efficient pig farming, it is required to evaluate the ongoing selection scenarios. Tools are lacking for the evaluation of pig selection scenarios in terms of environmental impacts to provide selection guidelines for a more sustainable pig production. Selection on residual feed intake (RFI) has been proposed to improve feed efficiency and potentially reduce the associated environmental impacts. The aim of this study was thus to develop a model to account for individual animal performance in life cycle assessment (LCA) methods to quantify the responses to selection. Experimental data were collected from the fifth generation of pig lines divergently selected for RFI (low line, more efficient pigs, LRFI; high line, less efficient pigs, HRFI). The average feed conversion ratio (FCR) and daily feed intake of LRFI pigs were 7% lower than the average of HRFI pigs (P < 0.0001). A parametric model was developed for LCA based on the dietary net energy fluxes in a pig system. A nutritional pig growth tool, InraPorc®, was included as a module in the model to embed flexibility for changes in feed composition, animal performance traits and housing conditions and to simulate individual pig performance. The comparative individual-based LCA showed that LRFI had an average of 7% lower environmental impacts per kilogram live pig at farm gate compared to HRFI (P < 0.0001) on climate change, acidification potential, freshwater eutrophication potential, land occupation and water depletion. High correlations between FCR and all environmental impact categories (>0.95) confirmed the importance of improvement in feed efficiency to reduce environmental impacts. Significant line differences in all impact categories and moderate correlations with impacts (>0.51) revealed that RFI is an effective measure to select for improved environmental impacts, despite lower correlations compared to FCR. Altogether more optimal criteria for efficient environment-friendly selection can then be expected through restructuring the selection indexes from an environmental point of view.