Critical review and practical recommendations to integrate the spatial dimension into life cycle assessment

Patouillard, Laure; Bulle, Cécile; Querleu, Cécile; Maxime, Dominique; Osset, Philippe; Margni, Manuele

doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.12.192

Cited by 65 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…The recently developed E-Balance impact methodology includes eutrophication CFs for China (Bai et al, 2017) and there are three methodologies with site-specific CFs for aquatic eutrophication for several developing countries: Impact World + (Bulle et al, 2012), ReCiPe 2016 (Huijbregts et al, 2016) and LC-Impact (Verones, 2016). However, the effective use of these CFs is limited as these methodologies have not yet been integrated into commercial LCA software (Patouillard et al, 2018) and fate of nutrients from agricultural soils (where sludge from WWTP is commonly applied) to water are not available worldwide (Helmes et al, 2012). Furthermore, CFs for marine eutrophication are not available for…”

Section: Regional Characterization Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life cycle assessment of wastewater treatment in developing countries: A review

2019

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Within developing countries, wastewater treatment (WWT) has improved in recent years in but remains a high priority sustainability challenge. Accordingly, life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have recently started to analyse the environmental impacts of WWT technologies on the specific context of less developed countries, mainly in China and India. This work presents a comprehensive review of this knowledge with the aim of critically analysing the main conclusions, gaps and challenges for future WWT-related LCAs in developing countries. The most commonly assessed technologies in the 43 reviewed articles are different variations of activated sludge and extensive treatments applied in decentralized systems; however, studies focused on advanced technologies or new sources of pollution (e.g. micropollutants) are still lacking. Goal and system boundaries are normally clearly defined, but significant stages for some technologies such as the construction and sludge management are frequently not included and functional units should be defined accordingly to specific conditions in developing countries. At the inventory level, a more concise description of sources and technical parameters would greatly improve the quality of the LCAs along with accountability of direct greenhouse gas emissions. Eutrophication and global warming are the two

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Section: Regional Characterization Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life cycle assessment of wastewater treatment in developing countries: A review

2019

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“…In addition, it is difficult to identify specific indicators of importance due to the spatial and temporal variability of soil properties (Garrigues et al., ; Milà i Canals, Romanyà, & Cowell, ). Despite recent advances to address spatial dimensions in LCA (e.g., Nitschelm, Aubin, Corson, Viaud, & Walter, ; Patouillard et al., ), further research is still needed to develop land use and land use change models that focus on scales appropriate for geotechnical systems.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of impact categories and environmental indicators for life cycle assessment of geotechnical systems

Raymond

Tipton

Kendall

et al. 2019

J of Industrial Ecology

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Life cycle assessment (LCA) has only had limited application in the geotechnical engineering discipline, though it has been widely applied to civil engineering systems such as pavements and roadways. A review of previous geotechnical LCAs showed that most studies have tracked a small set of impact categories, such as energy and global warming potential. Accordingly, currently reported environmental indicators may not effectively or fully capture important environmental impacts and tradeoffs associated with geotechnical systems, including those associated with land and soil resources. This research reviewed previous studies, methods, and models for assessment of land use and soil-related impacts to understand their applicability to geotechnical LCA. The results of this review show that critical gaps remain in current knowledge and practice. In particular, further development or refinement of environmental indicators, impact categories, and cause-effect pathways is needed as they pertain to geotechnical applications-specifically those related to soil quality, soil functions, and the ecosystem services soils provide. In addition, many existing methods emerge from research on land use and land use change related to other disciplines (e.g., agriculture). For applicability to geotechnical projects, the resolution of many of these methods and resulting indicators need to be downscaled from the landscape/macro scale to the project scale. In the near term, practitioners of geotechnical LCA should begin tracking changes to soil properties and report impacts to land and soil resources qualitatively.

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“…We use the name "territorial Emission Factor" to anchor our contribution in the "territorial LCA" (tLCA) framework, where geographical representativeness of the territory is emphasised. The term regionalisation is often used in LCA community to bring the light on providing more representative descriptions of spatially variable processes and phenomena (Patouillard et al, 2018). The difference between "territory" and "region" is the inclusion of stakeholders in the former, who can make decisions on the land-use planning (Nitschelm et al, 2016).…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The case study collected data at the subnational level, instead of direct linking with existing LCI databases that are at the national scale. To capture subnational variation in land-use inventory, two approaches are identified by Patouillard et al (2018):…”

Section: Data Collection and Inventorymentioning

confidence: 99%