Life cycle impact assessment methods for estimating the impacts of dissipative flows of metals

Abstract

The dissipation of metals leads to potential environmental impacts, usually evaluated for product systems with life cycle assessment. Dissipative flows of metals become inaccessible for future users, going against the common goal of a more circular economy. Therefore, they should be addressed in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) in the area of protection "Natural Resources." However, life cycle inventory databases provide limited information on dissipation as they only track emissions to the environment as elementary flows. Therefore, we propose two LCIA methods capturing the expected dissipation patterns of metals after extraction, based on dynamic material flow analysis data. The methods are applied to resource elementary flows in life cycle inventories. The lost potential service time method provides precautionary indications on the lost service due to dissipation over different time horizons. The average dissipation rate method distinguishes between the conservation potentials of different metals. Metals that are relatively well conserved, including major metals such as iron and aluminum, have low characterization factors (CFs). Those with poor process yields, including many companion and high-tech metals such as gallium and tellurium, have high CFs. A comparative study between the developed CFs, along with those of the Abiotic Depletion Potential and Environmental Dissipation Potential methods, show that dissipation trends do not consistently match those of the depletion and environmental dissipation potentials. The proposed methods may thus be complementary to other methods when assessing the impacts of resource use on the area of protection Natural Resources when pursuing an increased material circularity. This article met the requirements for a gold-silver JIE data openness badge at http://jie.click/badges.

Country-Specific External Costs of Abiotic Resource Use Based on User Cost Model in Life Cycle Impact Assessment

“…The dissipation of abiotic resources has been a subject of discussion in LCA. ,, To quantify the impacts of dissipation in a product system in LCA, it is necessary to estimate dissipative flows in life cycle inventory as well as assess their impact or loss of resource value in LCIA. − Although dissipation is an issue not only at mining sites but also throughout the life cycle of abiotic resources, one way to adopt the user cost model for dissipation may be using the weighted average of CFs (i.e., WCF) to assess the impact of dissipative flows. Integrating dynamic material flow analysis to estimate the dissipation and lifetime of abiotic resources with the user cost concept has the potential to contribute to the assessment of external costs of dissipation. , However, defining the depletion time can be an issue in adopting the user cost for assessing the impact of dissipative flow.…”

Fitness of product and service design for closed-loop material recycling: A framework and indicator

“…It could also complement other approaches that incorporate material quality based on energy use for recycling (Steinmann et al, 2019), which may be a further step towards incorporating quality considerations directly into LCA. However, unlike current life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods focusing on depletion with use-to-stock ratios (e.g., abiotic depletion potential, ADP (Guinée and Heijungs, 1995)) or on dissipation (e.g., dissipation factors by Charpentier Poncelet et al (2021)), is the criterion for quality subjective for each product requiring to define it on a case by case basis.…”

The Cradle-to-Cradle Life Cycle Assessment of Polyethylene terephthalate: Environmental Perspective

“…Emissions and resources are categorized into numerous impact categories, then converted to common impact units, and made comparable throughout this phase. The term “life cycle impact assessment” is commonly used to describe this phase (LCIA) [ 40 , 64 ]. LCIA is normally carried out following ISO 14044: 2006, which specifies four processes, two of which are required and two of which are optional.…”