International audienceThe evaluation of the environmental impact of an innovative material at an early stage of development is of fundamental importance during the design phase of a product. In this regard, a full-fledged Life Cycle Assessment presents some major limitations: it can be performed mainly as an ex-post analysis, and it does not account for the intrinsic properties of the material. The growing need to compare the properties of new materials with those of industrially optimized ones poses further issues. For example, production at the lab/pilot scale cannot be directly compared to industrial systems, primarily due to the large discrepancy in the yields of the processes involved. In the present work, an ex-ante Life Cycle Assessment approach is proposed to forecast the environmental impact of a new material, overcoming the aforementioned issues. The most relevant added value of the proposed methodology lies in the use of primary data collected on lab/pilot scale systems alongside data simulated from thermo-chemical considerations. A scale-up protocol is thus detailed and then applied to the case of polybutylene succinate, a biopolymer that is gaining attention particularly as a replacement for polyolefins, and is obtained from bio-based succinic acid. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is used to evaluate and compare different renewable sources and chemical routes available for the production of bio-based succinic acid. Monte Carlo simulation is used to process the uncertainty data for all of the assessments. The case study of polybutylene succinate highlights the advantages of the adopted scale-up methodology with particular reference to the ease of implementation and consistency of results
In today's social media context, many criticalities have emerged, particularly concerning the security of users' personal data and the unbalanced redistribution of the value generated. !is work, analyzing 40 emerging platforms, investigates how Blockchain technology is reshaping the social media scenario through transparency, value redistribution, ownership awareness, decentralization of data, and censorship resistance.
The work here presented moves from the acknowledgment that, even if blockchain technology has been around for more than ten years, the knowledge about its economic and business implications is fragmented and heterogeneous. In the first place, it is analyzed the shift from economics to tokenomics and the central role of the token within blockchain-based ecosystems. Subsequently, a generalized definition of the token is proposed. Diving into the requirements for a comprehensive description of tokens, that takes into account their wide variety, a comparative assessment of token classification frameworks available in the literature is performed. This analysis is leveraged to propose a new and comprehensive token classification framework, based on a morphological analysis representation. The proposed framework will be further refined with an empirical and iterative approach in future works.
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