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Commonly used materials constituting the core components of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), including the balance‐of‐plant, were classified according to the EU criticality methodology with an additional assessment of hazardousness and price. A life‐cycle assessment (LCA) of the materials potentially present in PEMFC systems was performed for 1 g of each material. To demonstrate the importance of appropriate actions at the end of life (EoL) for critical materials, a LCA study of the whole life cycle for a 1‐kW PEMFC system and 20,000 operating hours was performed. In addition to the manufacturing phase, four different scenarios of hydrogen production were analyzed. In the EoL phase, recycling was used as a primary strategy, with energy extraction and landfill as the second and third. The environmental impacts for 1 g of material show that platinum group metals and precious metals have by far the largest environmental impact; therefore, it is necessary to pay special attention to these materials in the EoL phase. The LCA results for the 1‐kW PEMFC system show that in the manufacturing phase the major environmental impacts come from the fuel cell stack, where the majority of the critical materials are used. Analysis shows that only 0.75 g of platinum in the manufacturing phase contributes, on average, 60% of the total environmental impacts of the manufacturing phase. In the operating phase, environmentally sounder scenarios are the hydrogen production with water electrolysis using hydroelectricity and natural gas reforming. These two scenarios have lower absolute values for the environmental impact indicators, on average, compared with the manufacturing phase of the 1‐kW PEMFC system. With proper recycling strategies in the EoL phase for each material, and by paying a lot of attention to the critical materials, the environmental impacts could be reduced, on average, by 37.3% for the manufacturing phase and 23.7% for the entire life cycle of the 1‐kW PEMFC system.

No abstract

The selection of most appropriate design and technological solutions to produce certain mould should capture technical performance, economical issues as well as environmental impacts occurred during the mould life cycle. In the paper an approach is presented to support the selection of alternative mould design solutions in the early design stage. It includes the use of Life Cycle Assessment methodology, Life Cycle Cost methodology and is supported by numerical simulations. The approach is applied to a case study where three mould designs for production of the same plastic product were compared. Finally, general conclusions regarding the resource efficient injection moulding processes are presented.

The Fuel Cells and Hydrogen (FCH) technologies will play an important role in a future where greenhouse gasses emissions need to be reduced. Nevertheless, a huge implementation of these technologies must be addressed taking into account an eco friendly scope not only from the manufacturing perspective but also from the end-of-life scope. A classification of the materials has been done considering the importance of each of them. To obtain a complete overview of the problem, different criteria have been compared: the cost, the scarcity of the material and the affections these materials can cause not only to the environment but also to the humans. This classification has been used to identify which are the most critical materials. Moreover, other transversal issues have been studied as the regulations that apply to FCH technologies from a paneuropean perspective and the strategies to face the end-of-life of these equipments. A holistic point of view has been considered in order to see how the process of dismantling and recycling faces different problems and which milestones to achieve in a future with a deep market penetration are.