Marten E. Toxopeus

Environmental benefits of PV powered lighting products for rural areas in south east Asia: A life cycle analysis with geographic allocation

Photovoltaic (PV) lighting products are increasingly used to provide rural households in developing countries with clean and safe lighting. These households usually do not have access to electricity from a power grid and rely on either kerosene lamps or electricity from car batteries which are inefficiently charged at local charging stations. PV lighting products can deliver a higher quality of service. Moreover, they are safer and more reliable (1). Another important aspect is their environmental benefit when compared to their traditional alternatives, which we have evaluated by a life cycle assessment. Our study is based on a case in Cambodia (2).

Prioritizing "Design for Recyclability" Guidelines, Bridging the Gap between Recyclers and Product Developers

This paper presents a Design For eXcellence (DFX) method for recyclability, resulting in a practical tool for product engineers. The tool enables an assessment of concept products as well as existing products and focuses on small domestic appliances recycled by shredding. The method enables quantifying recyclability performances of products by integrating a set of design guidelines, a recycling performance evaluation method, and prioritized improvement suggestions. After having the method implemented into a design support tool, a number of tests were executed. The preliminary tests of the method yield promising results, meeting expert expectations.

Developing IAM for Life Cycle Safety Assessment

This publication discusses aspects of the development of an impact assessment method (IAM) for safety. Compared to the many existing IAM’s for environmentally oriented LCA, this method should translate the impact of a product life cycle on the subject of safety. Moreover, the method should be applicable within Simapro. Besides the usual subjects, like the definition of effects and interventions, specific solutions had to be found for classification. Besides a dedicated impact assessment method for safety, also new data cards have to be developed to describe the necessary product characteristics to account for geometric and kinematic dependencies.

Social and Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (SELCA) Method for Sustainability Analysis: The Jeans Global Value Chain as a Showcase

In this chapter the concepts of social life cycle assessment and combined social and environmental LCA were explored through the application of existing LCA methods to the global value chain of jeans. The social and environmental life cycle assessment (SELCA) method resulted from this explorative research that aims to contribute to the battery of impact assessment tools of products whose value chain scope is multinational (global). From a broader perspective, SELCA has a double-folded purpose to (i) identify opportunities for environmental and social improvement at any of the value chain phases of products, for remediation goals, and (ii) predict the environmental and social performance of different ways (scenarios) to produce the same product, using it as a product design tool. To simplify SELCA development, it was decided to use a single product (jeans) as a showcase from the global textile sector. In this showcase, four scenarios for jeans assembly were compared; three of them were defined under the circular economy principles by including recycled materials (cotton, PET and nylon 6) during the yarn production. During the application of the SELCA method, some new challenges were encountered related to inventory analysis, in particular during data acquisition for social inventories. This is later mainly due to the extensive list of key stakeholders for the showcase and the qualitative nature of social metrics. This list starts with cotton cultivators from different countries where regulations and codes of conduct seem to have contextualised interpretations and consequently different levels of implementation. In this regard, governmental intervention to instrument the transition towards suitable social/environmental performance along the global jeans value chain was also discussed in this chapter.

Applying unit process life cycle inventor (UPLCI) methodology in product/packaging combinatons

This paper discusses how the UPLCI approach can be used for determining the inventory of the manufacturing phases of product/packaging combinations. The UPLCI approach can make the inventory of the manufacturing process of the product that is investigated more accurate. The life cycle of product/packaging combinations looks different from the life cycle of just a product, because two life cycles are interwoven. A first draft for a possible adaption and extension of the UPLCI framework is described. This is illustrated by examples from case studies. A suggestion for a taxonomy focusing on unit processes for product/packaging combinations is presented.