Development of LCA benchmarks for Austrian torrent control structures

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - This study emerged from a research project that aimed to develop a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model for torrent control structures. This...     

Screening LCA for large numbers of products

CIBA’s Textile Dyes and Chemicals divisions use screening LCAs for their 1700 sales products to improve portfolio management and ecological process development. Material flow, energy, and waste data for in-house manufacturing processes are extracted from our company databases into our LCA system ECOSYS. For meaningful comparisons of whole life cycles, we must include LCA estimates for over 4000 raw materials from other suppliers. Even crude estimates are preferable to the frequently practiced omission of unknown process steps since they allow worst-case or sensitivity analyses. Sources for mass flows are (decreasing order of reliability): process literature (SRI-PEP Yearbook, Ullmann, Kirk-Othmer, patents), yields of analogous processes, theoretical stoichiometry. Energy demands come from literature, or from a set of standard operation estimates developed by our process engineers. Wastes/emissions, if not published, are derived from yields and elemental balances, estimated emissions of energy carriers (BUWAL-132), and typical end-of-pipe measures in CIBA. These data sets are kept as “added-burden modules” (ABM) in our system, each with a set of “inherent burdens”, which are transformed to step-specific burden estimates by a “propagation” program, before the overall burdens of the whole process tree are cumulated. This program checks every process for actually measured burdens, before applying the attached ABM estimates to fill the gaps. Centralization of estimates as ABM with inherent burdens facilitates maintenance and adaptation. At present, well over 250 important intermediates were estimated and used in our product trees; many more follow rapidly. This article is an example of how industry is using LCA to address environmental issues.     

Screening LCA of French organic amendments and fertilisers

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - In France, agricultural recycling of organic waste is widespread, but LCIs of organic waste treatments are scarce. This work presents LCIs of...     

Transportation in LCA

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether transport and logistics substantially contribute to the environmental interventions and impacts identified in LCAs. Four LCAs, encompassing very different products in different countries, were screened for the relative contribution of transport to the overall environmental interventions and impacts. Aside from this, the contribution of transport within individual life cycle phases was investigated. In none of the LCAs did transport contribute to less than 5% of the energy related interventions or impacts, whereas contributions with more than ten percent occurred regularly, especially in events involving NO_x related impact. The importance of transport strongly depends on the kind of product studied. It seems to be especially important for agricultural products. With respect to individual phases of the life cycle, the study indicates that special attention is required for the transport of raw materials, for use phase of electronics and for the disposal phase of recyclable products.     

Current LCA database development in Japan -results of the LCA project

In 1998, the Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) launched a five-year national project entitled ‘Development of Life Cycle Impact Assessment for Products’ (commonly known as ‘the LCA Project’). The purpose of the project is to develop common LCA methodology as well as a highly reliable database that can be shared in Japan. Activities over these five years have resulted in the supply of LCI data on some 250 products. Industrial associations voluntarily provided data. The results of these activities are currently being made available on the Internet on a trial basis in the form of an LCA database. In addition, a method entitled ‘Life-cycle Impact assessment Method based on Endpoint modeling (LIME)’ was developed. It is expected that these results will be widely used in Japan in the future. This paper presents an outline of the results of the research and development that has been conducted in the LCA Project in Japan.     

Traffic noise in LCA

Background, aim, and scope  

According to some recent studies, noise from road transport is estimated to cause human health effects of the same order of magnitude as the sum of all other emissions from the transport life cycle. Thus, ISO 14′040 implies that traffic noise effects should be considered in life cycle assessment (LCA) studies where transports might play an important role. So far, five methods for the inclusion of noise in LCA have been proposed. However, at present, none of them is implemented in any of the major life cycle inventory (LCI) databases and commonly used in LCA studies. The goal of the present paper is to define a requirement profile for a method to include traffic noise in LCA and to assess the compliance of the five existing methods with this profile. It concludes by identifying necessary cornerstones for a model for noise effects of generic road transports that meets all requirements.     

Incorporating costs in LCA

The goal of LCA is to identify the environmental impacts resulting from a product, process, or activity. While LCA is useful for evaluating environmental attributes, it stops short of providing information that business managers routinely utilize for decision-making — i.e., dollars. Thus, decisions regarding the processes used for manufacturing products and the materials comprising those products can be enhanced by weaving cost and environmental information into the decision-making process. Various approaches have been used during the past decade to supplement environmental information with cost information. One of these tools is environmental accounting, the identification, analysis, reporting, and use of environmental information, including environmental cost data. Environmental cost accounting provides information necessary for identifying the true costs of products and processes and for evaluating opportunities to minimize those costs. As demonstrated through two case studies, many companies are incorporating environmental cost information into their accounting systems to prioritize investments in new technologies and products.     

LCA in decision-making processes

Synthetic sulfuric acid is used in a wide range of applications in fine chemical industry. Despite an already performed optimization of input amounts, used sulfuric acid is still a quantitatively important waste by-product. As a result, different utilization technologies for used sulfuric acid exist:

1. production of gypsum
2. thermal reductive cracking
3. thermal cracking and oxidation

This makes an LCA study of this waste by-product quite interesting. In this paper:

? the starting point for a comparative LCA of the above mentioned utilization technologies at a concrete situation is explained, in a work of Ciba-Geigy Corp.

? a short summary of the comparative LCA is presented

? lessons learned from performing the LCA and using it in a decision process are described.

     

Traffic noise in LCA

Background, aim, and scope  

An inclusion of traffic noise effects could change considerably the overall results of many life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. However, at present, noise effects are usually not considered in LCA studies, mainly because the existing methods for their inclusion do not fulfill the requirement profile. Two methods proposed so far seem suitable for inclusion in generic life cycle inventory (LCI) databases, and a third allows for inter-modal comparison. The aim of this investigation is an in-depth analysis of the existing methods and the proposition of a framework for modeling road transport noise emissions in LCI in accordance to the requirement profile postulated in part 1.     

Characterisation of social impacts in LCA

Background, aim, and scope  

The authors have suggested earlier a framework for life cycle impact assessment to form the modelling basis of social LCA. In this framework, the fundamental labour rights were pointed out as obligatory issues to be addressed, and protection and promotion of human dignity and well-being as the ultimate goal and area of protection of social LCA. The intended main application of this framework for social LCA was to support management decisions in companies who wish to conduct business in a socially responsible manner, by providing information about the potential social impacts on people caused by the activities in the life cycle of a product. Environmental LCA normally uses quantitative and comparable indicators to provide a simple representation of the environmental impacts from the product lifecycle. This poses a challenge to the social LCA framework because due to their complexity, many social impacts are difficult to capture in a meaningful way using traditional quantitative single-criterion indicators. A salient example is the violation of fundamental labour rights (child labour, discrimination, freedom of association, and right to organise and collective bargaining, forced labour). Furthermore, actual violations of these rights somewhere in the product chain are very difficult to substantiate and hence difficult to measure directly.     

LCA of electronic products

Intention, Goal, Scope, Background

A new paradigm called System-In-a-Package (SIP) is expected to represent the wave of future microsystem packaging and integration. No environmental assessment has been made of manufacturing processes for SIP and the purpose of this paper is to assess the upstream environmental impact of the process used by Chalmers to manufacture an electronic product using the SIP technology.

Objectives

This paper aims at an environmental assessment of a gallium arsenide (GaAs) Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) Switch Product based on a so-called SIP concept on a Liquid Crystalline Polymer (LCP) substrate. This study focuses on the identification of environmentally substantial upstream processes from cradle-to-gate for this product.

Methods

This work is based on a life cycle inventory model that has been developed earlier by the authors, and this model is now applied to the system including the straight-line manufacturing processes in the facilities of the Microtechnology Centre (MC2) at Chalmers University of Technology and the manufacturing processes of raw materials in the upstream processes. A main scenario was built in the LCA software EcoLab corresponding to the linear process in MC2 and other manufacturing processes were identified in the upstream which were used to develop the upstream process tree.

Results and Discussion

The spin coating of photoresistant material has the highest environmental impact within the system boundaries and the uncertainty of the results is estimated to be small. The exposure and development as well as deposition stages also give impacts, both for the copper and resistant material deposition. In the manufacturing processes inside MC2, the electricity consumption clearly dominates. The results predominantly reflect energy use, whereas toxicological aspects could not be reliably assessed due to lack of data and reliable methods, and therefore needs separate attention. Nevertheless, a toxicology assessment has been made with the Toxic Potential Indicator (TPI), which, compared to a telephone, showed a relatively large value for the switch. The toxic potential of the switch is higher per mass unit than a digital telephone.

Conclusions

The previously developed LCA data collection model worked well for the SIP product. The electricity consumption for the deposition machine and the solvent consumption in spin coating are the two most important hot spots. For greenhouse warming potential the acetone consumption in the spin coating steps is the most significant contributor, and the copper consumption in the copper deposition step dominates for abiotic resource depletion.

Recommendations and Outlook

It is recommended that the machines in the MC2 process lab used to manufacture the SIP product are studied for a longer period of time as it would make the electricity consumption figures more accurate. More electronic packaging concepts, such as System-on-a-chip (SOC) and multichip modules (MCM), should be evaluated and compared to SIP.

     

Efficient Information Visualization in LCA

Background, Goal and Scope  A complete life cycle assessment (LCA) always requires several itemizations of goal/scope definitions, inventory analysis and impact analysis. This requires the retrieval and collection of inventory information on all processes with which a product or any part of it comes into either direct or indirect contact. As a result, the data required for LCA is vast, uncertain and, therefore, complex. Up until now, unfortunately, and as far as the authors are aware, there has not been much computer-assisted aid available from any of the systems currently used in either academia or industry to support any life cycle (LC) related data representation, other than the traditional methods of tables, xy-graphs, bar charts, pie charts and various 3-D variants of those which are difficult for humans to interpret. Main Features  Benefiting from the synergy of latest developments in both visualization techniques and computer technology, the authors are able to introduce a new information representation approach based on glyphs. These exploit the human perceptual capability for distinguishing spatial structures and shapes presented in different colors and textures. Within this approach, issues of representing life cycle related information at a glance, filtering out data so as to reduce the information load, and representation of data features, such as uncertainty and estimated errors, are targeted. Results  Advanced information visualization, the process which transforms and maps data to a visual representation, employs the glyphs rendered here to create abstract representations of multi-dimensional data sets. Different parameters describing spatial, geometrical and retinal properties of such glyphs, and defining their position, orientation, shape, color, etc., can be used to encode more information in a comprehensible format, thus allowing multiple values to be encoded in those glyph parameters. The natural function of glyphs, linking (mapped) data within a known context with the attributes that in turn control their visualization, is believed capable of providing sufficient functionality to interactively support designers and LCA experts performing life cycle inventory (LCI) information analysis so that they can operate faster and more efficiently than at present. Conclusions  Within this paper, the first of a small series on efficient information visualization in LCA, the motivation for and essential basic principles of the approach are introduced and discussed. With this technique, the essential characteristics of data, relationships, patterns, trends, etc. can be represented in a much better structured and compact manner, thus rendering them clearer and more meaningful. It is hoped that a continuing interest in this work combined with an improved collaboration with industrial partners will eventually provide the grounds for translating this novel approach into an efficient and reliable tool enhancing applied LCA in practice on a broader base. Outlook  More technical details of the approach and its implementation will be introduced and discussed in the following papers, and examples will be offered demonstrating its application and first experimental translation into practice.     

LCA experiences in Danish industry

A study has been performed on Danish industry’s experiences with LCA. Twenty-six enterprises from different sectors conpleted a questionnaire. The enterprises are still in an adoption and learning phase, and experiences with full-blown LCA’s are sparse. Expectations of future market pressure to supply more environmentally friendly products is the most important incentive for the enterprises to engage in LCA activities. This pressure, however, has not yet emerged and the enterprises have not achieved the expected competitive advantages. LCA work has revealed new environmental aspects of the products with subsequent new priorities in the environmental efforts. Only a few enterprises have built up in-house LCA competence, whereas consultants are heavily involved in LCA work. In large enterprises, LCA work is predominantly carried out by environmental staff members, but the product development staff is also involved. The nature of the co-operation and distribution of roles between these two actors is not clear, and should therefore be studied further.