Jacquetta Lee

Critical review of life cycle analysis and assessment techniques and their application to commercial activities

Abstract This paper summarises the basic methodology of life cycle analysis, and aims to show that without clear understanding of the technique, life cycle inventories (LCI) can be easily misused to give preferred results, or misunderstood to give erroneous results which could lead to detrimental environmental decisions. It highlights areas where most errors are likely to exist, namely through the definition of system boundaries and the collection of data, and shows through examples how these can drastically affect LCI results. The paper also touches briefly on life cycle assessment techniques, which are aimed at evaluating environmental damage, and concludes with a brief summary of the properties of an ideal LCI which would provide a comprehensive data base for life cycle assessment.

Surviving or flourishing? Integrating business resilience and sustainability

Purpose – Businesses are always seeking resilient strategies so they can weather unpredictable competitive environments. One source of unpredictability is the unsustainability of commerces environmental, economic or social impacts and the limitations this places on businesses. Another is poor resilience causing erroneous and unexpected outputs. Companies prospering long-term must have both resilience and sustainability, existing in a symbiotic state. The purpose of this paper is to explore the two concepts and their relationship, their combined benefits and propose an approach for supporting decision makers to proactively build both characteristics. Design/methodology/approach – The paper looks at businesses as complex adaptive systems, how their resilience and sustainability can be defined and how these might be exhibited. It then explores how they can be combined in practice. Findings – The two qualities are related but have different purposes, moreover resilience has two major forms related to timesca...

Footprinting Farms, a comparison of three GHG calculators

Agriculture and forestry (including land use changes) contribute approximately 30% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, but have a significant mitigation potential. Several activities to reduce GHGs at a landscape scale are under development (e.g. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation activities or Clean Development Mechanism projects) but these will not be effective without improvements at the basic management scale: the farm. A number of farm-level GHG calculators have been developed; to increase farmers awareness of the GHG impacts of their management practices; to aid decision-support for mitigation actions; and to enable farmers to calculate and communicate their GHG emissions, whether for their own records, as a prerequisite to supply chain certification, or as part of larger scale mechanisms. This paper compares three farm-level GHG calculators with significant potential influence. It demonstrates how the tools differ in output when using the same input data and highlights in detail what lies behind these differences. It then discusses more generally some potential implications of using different calculators and the important considerations that must be made, thus helping future tool users or developers to interpret results and better achieve consistent and comparable results.

Ecodesign through environmental risk management: A focus on critical materials

This paper presents an approach to Ecodesign based on the management of environmental business risks, which are defined as ‘stakeholder responses to environmental impacts with the potential to cause harm to business objectives’. Case studies are used to demonstrate the approach, with a particular focus on the management of critical materials. The paper concludes that by using risk, environmental considerations can be integrated into design decisions at Rolls-Royce, although the method contains significant uncertainties. In particular, the paper highlights the complexity of both assessing the supply risk of a material and how this could translate into an impact on the business. The paper also discusses how the risk model could be expanded to address other environmental business hazards.

Integrating Environmental and Social Life Cycle Assessment: Asking the Right Question

Mobile phones offer many potential social benefits throughout their lifetime, but this life is often much shorter than design intent. Reuse of the phone in a developing country allows these social benefits to be fully realized. Unfortunately, under the current state of development of recycling infrastructure, recovery rates of phones after reuse are very low in those markets, which may lead to an environmental burden due to loss of materials to landfill. In order to recover those materials most effectively, recycling in developed countries may be the best option, but at a cost of the ability to reuse the phones. The issues facing integration of social and environmental concerns into a single life cycle assessment and resulting challenges of identifying the disposal option with the most sustainable outcome are explored using mobile phones as a case study. These include obtaining sufficient geographical and temporal detail of the end of life options, the collation and analysis of the large amounts of data generated and the weighting of the disparate environmental and social impact categories. The numerous challenges may mount up to make performing life cycle assessment of mobile phones unwieldy. Instead of trying to encompass every aspect in full, it is proposed that focus is given to answering a question which takes into account the resources available: it is important to ask the question which has the best chance of being answered.

Uncertainty communication in the environmental life cycle assessment of carbon nanotubes

Amidst the great technological progress being made in the field of nanotechnology, we are confronted by both conventional and novel environmental challenges and opportunities. Several gaps exist in the present state of knowledge or experience with nanomaterials. Understanding and managing the uncertainties that these gaps cause in LCAs is essential. Traditionally used for more established technology systems, environmental LCA is now being applied to nanomaterials by policy-makers, researchers and industry. However, the aleatory (variability) and epistemic (system process) uncertainties in LCAs of nanomaterials need to be handled correctly and communicated in the analysis. Otherwise, the results risk being misinterpreted, misguiding decision-making processes and could lead to significant detrimental effects for industry, research and policy-making. Here, we review current life cycle assessment literature for carbon nanotubes, and identify the key sources of uncertainty that need to be taken into consideration. These include: the potential for non-equivalency between mass and toxicity (potentially requiring inventory and impact models to be adjusted); the use of proxy data to bridge gaps in inventory data; and the often very wide ranges in material performance, process energy and product lifetimes quoted.

What Is ‘Value’ and How Can We Capture It from the Product Value Chain?

The mobile phone industry is based upon the rapid development of handsets and the high turnover of devices in order to drive sales. Phones are often used for shorter periods of time than their designed life, and when discarded it is often through channels that result in lost resource. This unsustainable business model places strain on resources and creates adverse environmental and social impacts. Through interrogation of a stock and flow model, a product-service system (PSS) for a small consumer electronic device, a mobile telephone, is proposed. The points at which value may be extracted from the PSS are identified. A quantitative measure of value is proposed in order to allow the evaluation of the most appropriate time to extract it. This value is not solely monetary, but is derived from the combination of indicators which encompass environmental, economic, and technological factors. A worked example is presented, in which it is found that the precious metals within the phone are the main determinants for value extraction. These metals are found in the printed circuit board, leading to a requirement to design phones for ease of extraction of these components in order to access the value within.

Greener manufacturing, maintenance and disposal : towards the ACARE targets

This paper looks at how the aerospace industry can achieve the Acare goal of greener manufacturing, maintenance and disposal. It looks further than merely reducing waste and eliminating hazardous materials and processes and suggests that the organisational structure of the industry will play an important role in facilitating a move towards such a goal. Greater co-operation or integration within the industry at all stages of the product life cycle chain is a fundamental requirement as individual companies run a risk of increasing the total environmental burdens if they concentrate solely on reducing their own impacts without considering the effect a change they make may have on other companies. The use of comprehensive environmental supply chain management systems and end of life plans can smooth the implementation of extended product responsibility and accelerate the benefits of greener manufacturing, maintenance and disposal.

Putting resilient sustainability into strategy decisions – case studies

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of testing a new approach to strategic sustainability and resilience – Sustainable Resilient Strategic Decision-Support (SuReSDS™).,The approach was developed and tested using action-research case studies at industrial companies. It successfully allowed the participants to capture different types of value affected by their choices, optimise each strategy’s resilience against different future scenarios and compare the results to find a “best” option.,SuReSDS™ enabled a novel integration of environmental and social sustainability into strategy by considering significant risks or opportunities for an enhanced group of stakeholders. It assisted users to identify and manage risks from different kinds of sustainability-related uncertainty by applying resilience techniques. Users incorporated insights into real-world strategies.,Since the case studies and test organisations are limited in number, generalisation from the results is difficult and requires further research.,The approach enables companies to utilise in-house and external experts more effectively to develop sustainable and resilient strategies.,The research described develops theories linking sustainability and resilience for organisations, particularly for strategy, to provide a new consistent, rigorous and flexible approach for applying these theories. The approach has been tested successfully and benefited real-world strategy decisions.

Towards Standardising Methods for Reporting the Embodied Energy Content of Aerospace Products

Within the aerospace industry there is a growing interest in evaluating and reducing the environmental impacts of products and related risks to business. Consequently, requests from governments, customers, manufacturers, and other interested stakeholders, for environmental information about aerospace products are becoming widespread. Presently, requests are inconsistent and this limits the ability of the aerospace industry to meet the informational needs of various stakeholders and reduce the environmental impacts of their products in a cost-effective manner. Energy consumption is a significant business cost, risk, and a simple proxy value for overall environmental impact. This paper presents the initial research carried out by an academic and industry consortium to develop standardised methods for calculating and reporting the embodied manufacturing energy content of aerospace products. Following an action research approach, three potential methods are identified and applied in a real manufacturing environment. Suitability for use across the aerospace value chain is assessed. The benefits, implementations issues, areas of data uncertainty, and differences in results are outlined. Results show companies could be over/under reporting the embodied manufacturing energy content of parts by a factor of 10. The subsequent business and EU policy implications for industry reporting and evaluating product risks are discussed. The paper concludes the novel research outcomes will be valuable to businesses and other interested stakeholders seeking to report or understand the embodied energy content of aerospace products and associated data uncertainty, as well as inform the development of future industry standards.