Ana LCA

Question 1

What is an environmental technology or product?

Answer 1

• A technology or product that conserves the natural environment and resources, and that reduces or does not increase the negative impacts of human involvement, e.g a wastewater treatment technology
• Technology/product that has an environmental added-value in comparison to other alternatives e.g either a whole new category of energy technologies such as tidal, or simply a better alternative to current technologies, such as new more efficient wind turbines.
• Technology/product that assists with monitoring the state of the environment e.g a pH or temp probe in a river.

Question 2

What is green-washing?

Answer 2

When companies or organisations deceptively use an image of sustainability embedded in their products or brands to encourage sales or positive reputation. Important to remember: everything has an environmental impact and everything is relative to a reference.

Question 3

What is environmental pressure?

Answer 3

A change in environmental conditions e.g use of resources, emissions, changes in landscape, land use, waste production, freshwater consumption

Question 4

What is environmental impact?

Answer 4

The impact that the pressure has on the environment e.g use of resources can lead to resource depletion, emissions can lead to air/water pollution, changes in landscape and land use can lead to degradation, waste production can lead widespread pollution, freshwater consumption can lead to water scarcity.

Question 5

Pressure and impact always same?

Answer 5

No for example increasing freshwater use for agriculture might result in huge environmental impact on a water stressed region, but have a negligible impact in an area where there is no water stress.

Question 6

What are environmental metrics?

Answer 6

Quantify or estimate the pressures and potential impacts of different production processes so that we can compare and decide on the best alternative from an environmental standpoint. Very significant uncertainties associated with these metrics and our decisions are only as good as our estimates.

Question 7

What are simple and aggregate indicators?

Answer 7

The quantification of different environmental pressures and impacts. Simple indicators or indices are based on direct measures that are easily and accurately quantifiable. However, at times it is necessary to make more complex decisions and it is possible to combine simple indicators into aggregate indicators, that allow a comparison of different aspects of that problem at the same time.

Question 8

Examples of simple and aggregate indicators

Answer 8

Simple: water consumption, land use, CO2 emissions, energy consumption
Aggregate: GWP which considers the radiative forcing of different molecules relative to that of CO2, soil health that considers different aspects of soil quality from the presence of pollutants to the soil structure, acidification potential.

Question 9

Different types of metrics and what we need to know for each

Answer 9

• The footprint family
• Environmental labels
• Environmental impact assessment
• Risk assessment
• Life-cycle assessment
  What to know:
  what are they and what do they do
  what are some of their limitations
  in which situations can they be useful
  what are some of their limitations
  for LCA what are the basic steps

Question 10

Ultimate goal of environmental metrics?

Answer 10

To enable someone to make a sound and informed decision about the potential environmental impacts or benefits of implementing/deploying/designing/commercialising a product or technology.

Question 11

Retrospective and prospective focuses of metrics?

Answer 11

Retrospective: they only quantify what already exists
Prospective: attempt to estimate what the impacts of making a certain decision will be

Question 12

Examples of retrospective and prospective metrics

Answer 12

Retrospective: any type of resource consumption indicator e.g energy consumption at uni, or even its environmental footprint. To calculate this indicator, you will measure things like energy consumption, CO2 emissions, water consumption etc. Your measurements only characterise a situation that already happened, they are not predicting what will happen in the future.
An example of a prospective metric is any type of risk assessment or environmental impact assessment regarding a potential project/technology/product. To decide this, you are measuring diff aspects of the potential impacts or risks of that project, and deciding if implementing this change is a good idea from an environmental perspective.

Question 13

Challenges of environmental metrics

Answer 13

• Integrate technological aspects with socio-economical and behavioural aspects
• Accounting for uncertainty, assumptions, and regional influences
• Standarization
• Specificity v breadth

Question 14

Ecological footprint:

• Research question
• Unit of measurement

Answer 14

Amount of biosphere’s regenerative capacity that is directly and indirectly (i.e embodied in trade) used by humans (ecological footrpint) compared with how much is available (biocapacity) at both local and global scale.
Measured in global hectares (gha) of bioproductive land. Gha is not a measure of the area, but rather the ecological production associated with an area.
Can also be expressed in terms of actual physical hectares
Usually expressed per capita

Question 15

Carbon footprint:

• Research question
• Unit of measurement

Answer 15

Total amount of GHG emissions (CO2, CH4, N2O, HFC, PFC and SF6) that are directly and indirectly caused by consumption of goods or services or accumulated over the life stage of products.
Measured in kg of CO2 when only CO2 is included and kg of CO2- e when others included.
No conversion to an area unit takes place to avoid assumptions and uncertainty, often expressed per capita.

Question 16

Water footprint:

• Research question
• Unit of measurement

Answer 16

Human appropriation of the volume of freshwater demanded by human consumption.
Measured in water volume per unit of time (usually m3/yr) for the water footprint of processes, m3/ton or L/kg for water footprint of products, water vol per unit of time for the water footprint of a geographical area.

Question 17

What are environmental labels?

Answer 17

Different set of criteria that assess products in each category. If product fulfils criteria -> label. Environmental labels enable a company to easily communicate with their customers the environmental performance of the product they are buying. Serves as an instrument for product differentiation, but it can also serve as a way for a company to set internal quality standards necessary to achieve the criteria for a certain label.

Question 18

Types of labels

Answer 18

Type 1 - ecolabels: Multi-issues third party voluntary labels indicating high environmental performance based on a set of life cycle based criteria and designed and implemented in a transparent manner.
Examples: blue angel, nordic swan, canadian environment choice.
Type ll - self declared environmental claims: private claims, 1st party verified, adhering to specific principles so that verifiable, accurate info, not misleading. Examples: recycled content, biodegradable.
Type lll - environmental declarations: quantifiable environmental info, based on life-cycle analysis, using independent verifiable data, primarily used for business-to-business communication. Examples: eco-leaf, Korean environmental declaration or products.

Question 19

Pros and cons of eco-labels

Answer 19

Benefits:
- enables a consumer/business to compare between products or services
- stimulates a business to produce ‘green’
Challenges:
- often based on one parameter or one impact
- limited by scale
- can be confusing or misleading
- self-declared
- green-washing and misleading marketing

Question 20

What is environmental risk and impact assessment?

Answer 20

Qualitative or semi-quantitative approaches that list potential impacts and risks and conclude on its severity -> they are decision making tools.
- Environmental impact assessment (EIA):
used since 1960s, potential environmental impacts of large development projects, since 1985, compulsory in the EU when likely to have environmental impacts
- Environmental risk assessment:
identification of the risk, qualitative and/or quantitative assessment. Closely related to uncertainty: estimating the probability of events and predicting the events using the knowledge that is available.

Question 21

5 Phases of EIA

Answer 21

1. Screening: often results in a categorisation of the project and from this a decision is made on whether or not a full EIA is to be carried out.
2. Scoping: is the process of determining which are the most critical issues to study and will involve community participation to some degree. It is at this early stage that EIA can most strongly influence the outline proposal.
3. Detailed prediction and mitigation studies: follow scoping and are carried out in parallel with feasibility studies.
4. The main output report is called an environmental impact statement (EIS or ES) and contains a detailed plan for managing and monitoring environmental impacts both during and after implementation.
5. Finally, an audit of the EIA process is carried out sometime after implementation. The audit serves a useful feedback and learning function.

Question 22

Life cycle assessment

Answer 22

Compilation and evaluation of the inputs, outputs and the potential environmental impacts of a product or system throughout its life cycle.
Uses: process analysis, material selection, product evaluation, product comparison, policy-making, measuring performance, marketing

Question 23

1. Goal and scope

Answer 23

Why are doing this study and what do we expect to achieve? What is the system boundary? List all the diff steps in producing the product/technology/service from raw materials to recycle waste management and set system boundary as being around all these diff processes.

Question 24

2. Inputs and Outputs Inventory (LCI)

Answer 24

Inventory of all the inputs and outputs within the system boundary. Define unit of reference e.g analysis for certain amount of biofuel produced.

Question 25

3. Impact assessment

based on local environment

Answer 25

1. Selection of impact categories and classification
2. Characterisation
3. Normalisation
4. Weighting
   Elementary flows -> Midpoints -> End points
   Possible impact categories:
   - global warming
   - stratospheric ozone depletion
   - photochemical ozone formation: toxicity due to highly reactive molecules such as ozone produced as a result of industrial processes
   - acidification (not ocean acidification): processes that increase the acidity of water and soil systems by hydrogen ion concentration, caused by atmospheric deposition of acidifying substances generated largely from emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and ammonia.
   - eutrophication: process where a body of water becomes enriched with nutrients such as nitrogen or phosphorus, delivered from waste streams or agriculture run offs. This enrichment in nutrients leads to a rapid and excessive growth of algae, cyanobacteria or even some aquatic plants, until the depletion of the nutrients. Algal blooms result in thick layer of organic matter that covers the surface of the water body and leads to depletion of oxygen levels due to both the decomposition of organic matter, and the coverage of the surface of the water which prevents photosynthesis in the deeper layers of the ecosystem. Consequences can be complete suffocation of the ecosystem, production of gas emissions from the decomposition of the organic matter, production of toxins by some species of cyanobacteria and the visual degradation of the landscape.
   The LCI lists all the flows of inputs and outputs such as emissions of gas, water, waste, materials etc -> determine the potential impact on he environment of that particular input/output flow e.g emissions of CO2 would have an impact in global warming, emissions of CFCs could also impact this but also on depletion of ozone layer etc… potential direct impacts = mid point categories

Question 26

Indicators

Answer 26

In most cases, it is possible to calculate an estimation of the potential impacts of the inputs/outputs measured in the LCI. In order to do this, you can use a proxy, such as an indicator, to quantify impacts. Some indicators, like the global warming potential, are well established e.g this one is based on the radiative forcing of each compound, in relation to the radiative forcing of CO2. Other indicators may be less well established and they will be quantified/estimated on a case by case basis depending on the available date. Limitations of each indicator need to be understood e.g GWP is calculated typically over 100 years and therefore may not be accurate enough to describe the impact of molecules with shorter lifetimes in the atmosphere. Also, doesn’t describe the regional or local effects. Other difficulties are related to the fact that dispersion of green-house gases can be uneven in the atmosphere, or a lack of info on combinational effects.

Question 27

Damage categories/end-point categories

Answer 27

The diff mid-point categories will combine and effect the environment in a broader sense: damage categories: human/ecosystem health, contribution to climate change, or availability of resources. Calculating/estimating these impacts is more difficult and the associated uncertainty is a lot higher due to difficulty in quantifying the exact impacts. -> example: eutrophication: if stream containing N2 or phosphorus is emitted, this potential impact can be calculated using the eutrophication potential of a certain compound to have an impact on eutrophication in relation to the release of 1 kg of nitrate. However, since eutrophication can also be very dependent on regional or local characteristics, you can use other strategies, like determining the fate of the nitrogen and phosphorus streams in the environment (eg dispersion), the fixation of nutrients in the environment (e.g type of landscape rural or urban, type of soil, average rainfall etc) and then the response of the environment in response to these streams.

Question 28

Steps for the impact assessment

Answer 28

• selection of impact categories and classification (mandatory):
  In this step, the environmental impacts relevant to the study are identified. The elementary slows from the LCI are then assigned to impact categories according to the substances’ ability to contribute to diff environmental problems.
• characterisation (mandatory):
  The impact of each emission or resource consumption is modelled quantitatively, according to the environmental mechanism. The result is expressed as an impact score in a unit common to all contributions within the impact category by applying the characterisation factors.
  Example: kg of CO2 equivalents for greenhouse gases contributing to the impact category ‘climate change’ -> characterisation of CO2 is 1, for methane it is 20 -> higher climate change potential.
• Normalisation (optional) :
  The characterised impact scores are associated with a common reference, such as the impacts caused by one person during one year in a stated geographic context. This facilitates comparisons across impact categories and/or areas of protection.
• Weighting (optional): The diff environmental impact categories and/or areas of protection are ranked according to their relative importance. Weighting may be necessary when trade-off situations occur in LCAs which are being used for comparing alternative products.