Development and applicability of life cycle impact assessment methodologies

Yang, Sheng; Ma, Kebo; Liu, Zhiqiang; Ren, Jingzheng; Man, Yi

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-818355-7.00005-1

Cited by 30 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 96 publications

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“…The economic parameters that can potentially be included in the sustainability calculation of the metabolic flux set are, for example, media compound costs, market price of product components, and waste management costs (or negative price of the produced components) [30] , [31] . Environmental impacts can be assessed according to the well-established LCA methodology [32] and media compounds and product components can be characterized by their aquatic acidification potential, aquatic eutrophication potential, aquatic ecotoxicity potential, terrestrial eco-toxicity potential, terrestrial acidification/nutrification potential, abiotic depletion potential, and global warming potential [33] , [34] calculated based on the data available in such databases as Ecoinvent or GaBi and others [35] . The LCA impact categories or other relevant approaches [36] can be used to also assess the societal sustainability via e.g., the human health impacts of the media compounds and product components by their human toxicity potential, ozone depletion potential, photochemical oxidant creation potential, as well as impacts of urban, agricultural, natural land occupation potential, public opinion and social acceptance, and jobs created.…”

Section: Sustainable Metabolic Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable metabolic engineering for sustainability optimisation of industrial biotechnology

Stalidzāns

Dāce

2021

Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal

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Industrial biotechnology represents one of the most innovating and labour-productive industries with an estimated stable economic growth, thus giving space for improvement of the existing and setting up new value chains. In addition, biotechnology has clear environmental advantages over the chemical industry. Still, biotechnology’s environmental contribution is sometimes valued with controversy and societal aspects are frequently ignored. Environmental, economic and societal sustainability of various bioprocesses becomes increasingly important due to the growing understanding about complex and interlinked consequences of different human activities. Neglecting the sustainability issues in the development process of novel solutions may lead to sub-optimal biotechnological production, causing adverse environmental and societal problems proportional to the production volumes. In the paper, sustainable metabolic engineering (SME) concept is proposed to assess and optimize the sustainability of biotechnological production that can be derived from the features of metabolism of the exploited organism. The SME concept is optimization of metabolism where economic, environmental and societal sustainability parameters of all incoming and outgoing fluxes and produced biomass of the applied organisms are considered. The extension of characterising features of strains designed by metabolic engineering methods with sustainability estimation enables ab initio improvement of the biotechnological production design.

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Section: Sustainable Metabolic Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable metabolic engineering for sustainability optimisation of industrial biotechnology

Stalidzāns

Dāce

2021

Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal

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“…LCC is an evaluation of economic dimension throughout their life cycle [18]. The S-LCA was introduced to account for social impacts of products [19], and it is the most powerful tool for evaluation of sustainability of social impacts of products alongside their life cycle [20]. S-LCA has been developed in order to add the social sustainability aspect to the LCA approach [21].…”

Section: The Elements Of Sustainability In Life Cycle Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They tried to identify two important sections of S-LCA, which were either developed based on company perspective or societal perspective. Later, many scholars adopted the company perspective because it clarified problems that differentiate the S-LCA study with ELCA, instead of taking process units when not considering company perspective [19]. People are viewed as stakeholders in the S-LCA, which calculates the impacts of the company's business on human being.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In S-LCA, the multicriteria indicator model improves on the standard single-criteria model. Single-criterion indicators, also known as "direct indicators", often fall short of explaining the nuances of social issues [19]. This multi-criteria indicator model identifies particular managerial interventions or efforts to provide an aggregate explanation of each effect category with specific issues.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Social Consideration in Product Life Cycle for Product Social Sustainability

2021

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Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) is an emerging and pivotal tool for sustainability evaluation of products throughout their life cycle. Understanding deeply published papers helps to modify methods and identify research gaps. The aim of this study is to discover the existing gap in the S-LCA of products and to find the weaknesses of the approach. The method of performing the review was a narrative review where published papers from 2006 to 2020 were included through the use of the Web of Science and Scopus databases. S-LCA is considered to be relevant to a majority of sectors and processes (agricultural, industrial, technology, energy, and tourism). However, there is not sufficient research on evaluation of S-LCA on cereal crops and livestock output. It is indicated that, in the present S-LCA studies, there has been a lack of attention paid to the society and value chain actors and final consumer stakeholders. The elements of sexual harassment and employment relationships are not considered in SLCA studies. Italy has the largest amount of cases of S-LCA studies. The major challenges of applying S-LCA (by using site specific data) is data collection, which is time-consuming. It is recommended to evaluate a comprehensive sustainability assessment by adding cost of social assessment to LCA since there has been a lack of attention on assessment of cost in S-LCA.

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“…They found studies mainly focused on specific study objects, such as specific industries [25] or cases [26] with a limited system boundary allocating their upstream and downstream impact. However, while methods such as LCA and LCC are methodically well established, S-LCA is still at an earlier stage of methodical development and harmonization [21,27,28].…”

Section: Introduction 1backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrated Multidimensional Sustainability Assessment of Energy System Transformation Pathways

et al. 2021

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Sustainable development embraces a broad spectrum of social, economic and ecological aspects. Thus, a sustainable transformation process of energy systems is inevitably multidimensional and needs to go beyond climate impact and cost considerations. An approach for an integrated and interdisciplinary sustainability assessment of energy system transformation pathways is presented here. It first integrates energy system modeling with a multidimensional impact assessment that focuses on life cycle-based environmental and macroeconomic impacts. Then, stakeholders’ preferences with respect to defined sustainability indicators are inquired, which are finally integrated into a comparative scenario evaluation through a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), all in one consistent assessment framework. As an illustrative example, this holistic approach is applied to the sustainability assessment of ten different transformation strategies for Germany. Applying multi-criteria decision analysis reveals that both ambitious (80%) and highly ambitious (95%) carbon reduction scenarios can achieve top sustainability ranks, depending on the underlying energy transformation pathways and respective scores in other sustainability dimensions. Furthermore, this research highlights an increasingly dominant contribution of energy systems’ upstream chains on total environmental impacts, reveals rather small differences in macroeconomic effects between different scenarios and identifies the transition among societal segments and climate impact minimization as the most important stakeholder preferences.

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Development and applicability of life cycle impact assessment methodologies

Cited by 30 publications

References 96 publications

Sustainable metabolic engineering for sustainability optimisation of industrial biotechnology

Sustainable metabolic engineering for sustainability optimisation of industrial biotechnology

Social Consideration in Product Life Cycle for Product Social Sustainability

Integrated Multidimensional Sustainability Assessment of Energy System Transformation Pathways

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