Hans-Jörg Althaus

Contribution of Li-Ion Batteries to the Environmental Impact of Electric Vehicles

Battery-powered electric cars (BEVs) play a key role in future mobility scenarios. However, little is known about the environmental impacts of the production, use and disposal of the lithium ion (Li-ion) battery. This makes it difficult to compare the environmental impacts of BEVs with those of internal combustion engine cars (ICEVs). Consequently, a detailed lifecycle inventory of a Li-ion battery and a rough LCA of BEV based mobility were compiled. The study shows that the environmental burdens of mobility are dominated by the operation phase regardless of whether a gasoline-fueled ICEV or a European electricity fueled BEV is used. The share of the total environmental impact of E-mobility caused by the battery (measured in Ecoindicator 99 points) is 15%. The impact caused by the extraction of lithium for the components of the Li-ion battery is less than 2.3% (Ecoindicator 99 points). The major contributor to the environmental burden caused by the battery is the supply of copper and aluminum for the production of the anode and the cathode, plus the required cables or the battery management system. This study provides a sound basis for more detailed environmental assessments of battery based E-mobility.

The Western lifestyle and its long way to sustainability.

Since Fukushima, few people still consider nuclear power as a safe technology. The explosion of Deepwater Horizon was yet another incident revealing the dangers involved in the hunt for fossil fuels. Despite the public attention and outrage at these events, neither the concept of environmental citizenship, nor the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has prevailed in the struggle against environmental degradation. Economic growth offsets efficiency gains, while strategies for energy sufficiency are usually not seriously considered. Action toward a more sustainable society, for example, a 2000 W- and 1 ton CO2-society, must be taken by individuals but further incentives must be set. In order to provide individuals with detailed information about their mitigation options, we took the results from a survey of environmental behavior of 3369 Swiss Citizens, and combined them with life cycle assessment. Our results from this bottom-up approach show a huge bandwidth of the ecological footprints among the individuals interviewed. We conclude that a continuous consumption of not more than 2000 W per person seems possible for the major part of the population in this society. However, it will be far more difficult not to exceed 1 ton CO2 per capita.

Modern individual mobility

The transport sector is responsible for almost 60% of the oil consumption or almost 30% of the total energy consumption in OECD countries (IEA 2011). The dominant share of this energy consumption is caused by individual passenger transport by roads and air transport. Even though technological progress has constantly improved the fuel efficiency of vehicles combustion engines, the energy consumption of individual road transports is constantly increasing, mainly due to increasing population and increasing distances travelled daily. This leads to an increase in CO2 emissions from road transport in the EU by 20% between 1990 and 2000 (de Haan et al. 2007). Thus, individual mobility is one of the most relevant and fastest growing contributors to climate change. Also, human-toxic emissions from this sector are not negligible despite increasingly rigorous emission standards. The daily limit values for PM10 and for NO2 in 2009 still exceeded at more than 30% of the traffic sites across Europe (EU-27) and (Kunzli et al. 2000) attributed about 3% of total mortality in Austria, France and Switzerland to air pollution of motorized road traffic. And also external costs from road passenger transport in the USA due to air pollution are estimated higher than those due to climate change (Delucchi and McCubbin 2011). From a global perspective, the transport sector is not only a very relevant but also a rapidly growing energy consumer: its share on worldwide primary energy consumption is expected to rise from 21.8% in 2000 to about 34% in 2050 (de Haan et al. 2007). Knowing that vehicle density per capita increases with increasing GDP (almost linear rise from 0 vehicles per capita at GDP 0 to 0.3 vehicles per capita at GDP

Challenges for LCAs of Complex Systems: The Case of a Large-Scale Precious Metal Refinery Plant

10,000) and considering that annual economic growth in emerging nations like India (population 1.2 billion, GDP per capita about

The ecoinvent Database: Overview and Methodological Framework (7 pp)

3,500, average annual growth ca. 7%) and China (population 1.3 billion, GDP per capita

Relevance of simplifications in LCA of building components

7600, average annual growth rate ca. 10%) is considerable, a steep increase in vehicle numbers and kilometers driven is to be expected. By 2050 one expects 5 billion cars (2010: 1 billion) driving 50 trillion km per year, emitting 6 billion tons of CO2 (i.e. about 20% of overall annual emission in 2010). From this context, it is obvious that individual mobility is one of the most relevant issues in the discussions on climate change and urban pollution. Some years ago, biofuels were hoped to be the magic bullet to solve all problems. LCA, however, showed that even though many biofuels might have climate change mitigation potential, overall environmental effects of biofuel based mobility are often worse than for fossil fueled transports. And, just recently, the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency acknowledged a “serious error” in the greenhouse gas accounting methodology used for European Union regulations and policy targets.

The Environmental Relevance of Capital Goods in Life Cycle Assessments of Products and Services

Umicore Precious Metal Refining (UPMR) runs a high-tech industrial metal refinery which recovers 17 different metals from end-of-life consumer products and from by-products of the non-ferrous industry. We present an approach for an attributive gate-to-gate LCA study of this system, which is characterised by multi-input/multi-output processes, changing feed compositions and time lags. We propose five assumptions to reduce the complexity of the highly dynamic system. We compiled inventory data for over thirty sub-processes and allocated it over the metals passing the sub-process by either a mass-based or metal revenue based allocation. The exemplary results for rhodium, platinum, tellurium and copper (impact assessment method: global warming potential) show a high dependence of allocation choice and different patterns of the metals for metal revenue based allocation due to the high volatility of prices.