Identifying the socioeconomic determinants of industrial hazardous waste generation: South Korea as a case study.

The South Korean government has set an ambitious target to reduce industrial hazardous waste (IHW) as part of its transition towards a circular economy. Moreover, effective management of IHW within the country has become crucial, given that IHW trade is regulated by the Basel Convention. Despite the urgent need for well-founded environmental policies, there is a lack of essential information on the characteristics and determinants of IHW generation, which hinders the effectiveness of existing IHW policies. To address this information gap, this study developed a South Korean extended IHW input-output model for 2008 and 2018 to characterize IHW generation and applied structural decomposition analysis to identify the socioeconomic determinant of change of IHW generation. The results reveal that consumption, export, and direct IHW intensity change of 'Chemical', 'Electronic and electrical equipment', 'Basic metal', and 'Other service' emerge as dominant determinants for IHW growth. Conversely, technology change, including technological structure change and direct IHW intensity change, of 'Basic metal' and 'Other service' is the key driver for IHW reduction. In addition, an intriguing aspect of the study relates to the supply chain's influence on IHW generation. The indirect growth of IHW resulting from expanding exports and consumption contributes nearly twice as much to the overall increase in IHW as direct IHW growth. These valuable insights pave the way for the South Korean government to establish holistic and customized environmental policies regarding IHW. It emphasizes the importance of considering expanded global system boundaries, technological advancements, and purchasers' consumption patterns as dominant factors in formulating these policies. Furthermore, this study not only provides crucial guidance for the government's decision-making but also suggests strengthening environmental management and monitoring practices.

Life cycle inventory of plastics losses from seafood supply chains: Methodology and application to French fish products.

Plastic debris into the environment is a growing threat for the ecosystems and human health. The seafood sector is particularly concerned because it generates plastic losses and can be endangered by plastic contamination. Life cycle assessment (LCA) does not properly consider plastic losses and related impacts, which is a problem in order to find relevant mitigation strategies without burden shifting. This work proposes a methodology for quantifying flows of plastics from the life cycle of the seafood products to the environment. It is based on loss rate and final release rate considering a pre-fate approach as proposed by the Plastic Leak Project. They are defined for 5 types of micro and macro plastic losses: lost fishing gears, marine coatings, plastic pellets, tire abrasion and plastic mismanaged at the end-of-life. The methodology is validated with a case study applied to French fish products for which relevant data are available in the Agribalyse 3.0 database. Results show that average plastic losses are from 75 mg to 4345 mg per kg of fish at the consumer, depending on the species and the related fishing method. The main plastic losses come from lost fishing gears (macroplastics) and tire abrasion (microplastics). Results show high variability: when mismanaged, plastic packaging at the end-of-life (macroplastics) is the main loss to the environment. As a next step the methodology is to be applied to other fish or shellfish products, or directly implemented in a life cycle inventory database. Further research should characterize the related impacts to the environment when life cycle impact assessment methodologies will be available, and identify eco-design solutions to decrease the major flows to the environment identified.

Life cycle assessment of fish and seafood processed products - A review of methodologies and new challenges.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely applied in many different sectors, but the marine products and seafood segment have received relatively little attention in the past. In recent decades, global fish production experienced sustained growth and peaked at about 179 million tonnes in 2018. Consequently, increased interest in the environmental implications of fishery products along the supply chain, namely from capture to end of life, was recently experienced by society, industry and policy-makers. This timely review aims to describe the current framework of LCA and its application to the seafood sector that mainly focused on fish extraction and processing, but it also encompassed the remaining stages. An excess of 60 studies conducted over the last decade, along with some additional publications, were comprehensively reviewed; these focused on the main LCA methodological choices, including but not limited to, functional unit, system boundaries allocation methods and environmental indicators. The review identifies key recommendations on the progression of LCA for this increasingly important sustaining seafood sector. Specifically, these recommendations include (i) the need for specific indicators for fish-related activities, (ii) the target species and their geographical origin, (iii) knowledge and technology transfer and, (iv) the application and implementation of key recommendations from LCA research that will improve the accuracy of LCA models in this sector. Furthermore, the review comprises a section addressing previous and current challenges of the seafood sector. Wastewater treatment, ghost fishing or climate change, are also the objects of discussion together with advocating support for the water-energy-food nexus as a valuable tool to minimize environmental negativities and to frame successful synergies.

Teaching life cycle assessment in higher education.

Purpose: Scientific Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) literature provides some examples of LCA teaching in higher education, but not a structured overview of LCA teaching contents and related competencies. Hence this paper aims at assessing and highlighting trends in LCA learning outcomes, teaching approaches and developed content used to equip graduates for their future professional practices in sustainability. Methods: Based on a literature review on teaching LCA in higher education and a collaborative consensus building approach through expert group panel discussions, an overview of LCA learning and competency levels with related teaching contents and corresponding workload is developed. The levels are built on the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) and Bloom's taxonomy of learning. Results and discussion: The paper frames five LCA learning and competency levels that differ in terms of study program integration, workload, cognitive domain categories, learning outcomes, and envisioned professional skills. It furthermore provides insights into teaching approaches and content, including software use, related to these levels. Conclusions and recommendations: This paper encourages and supports higher educational bodies to implement a minimum of 'life cycle literacy' into students' curriculum across various domains by increasing the availability, visibility and quality of their teaching on life cycle thinking and LCA.

Updating and Road-testing Life Cycle Inventory Data Review Criteria: Toward Global Consensus and Guidance On Data Quality Assessment.

Data quality of life cycle inventory background databases should be ensured in order to be useful for life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. However, databases do not always have procedures to evaluate the quality of the data sets in place. The Global Guidance Principles for LCA Databases of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in collaboration with the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) provide, among others, recommendations to enhance data quality through improved documentation and review. Flagship 2a in Phase 3 of the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative aimed to enable the practical implementation of these recommendations with the development of review criteria and the testing of these criteria on 3 national databases. After a pilot-testing phase, this project entered a more mature road-testing exercise, of which the results are presented in this paper. The review criteria have been updated and provide more emphasis on goal and scope documentation completeness and include a new cluster of criteria that evaluate the materiality of the data set. The updated criteria have been applied to national databases of Thailand, Australia, and Chile. All databases would benefit from additional documentation, for example, on system boundaries, the reference model, sampling procedures, and cut-off criteria. Furthermore, conducting the review was enabled by extensive documentation and data accessibility in LCA software. Communication of the criteria to the database managers enabled them to anticipate data quality requirements of the global LCA community and improve the data sets in advance. Reviewers sometimes had a different interpretation of the criteria, which suggests that there is room for additional fine-tuning of the process guidance and exemplification of review criteria. This project has demonstrated that the criteria are applicable to and provide useful feedback for databases with different levels of maturity and contribute to improving quality of life cycle inventory (LCI) data. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2020;16:517-524. © 2020 SETAC.

Assessing the impact of space debris on orbital resource in life cycle assessment: A proposed method and case study.

The space sector is a new area of development for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies. However, it deals with strong particularities which complicate the use of LCA. One of the most important is that the space industry is the only human activity crossing all stages of the atmosphere during the launch event or the atmospheric re-entry. As a result, interactions occur not only with the natural environment but also with the orbital environment during the use phase and the end-of-life of space missions. In this context, there is a lack of indicators and methods to characterise the complete life-cycle of space systems including their impact on the orbital environment. The end-of-life of spacecraft is of particular concern: space debris proliferation is today a concrete threat for all space activities. Therefore, the proposed work aims at characterising the orbital environment in term of space debris crossing the orbital resource. A complete methodology and a set of characterisation factors at midpoint level are provided. They are based on two factors: (i) the exposure to space debris in a given orbit and (ii) the severity of a potential spacecraft break-up leading to the release of new debris in the orbital environment. Then, we demonstrate the feasibility of such approach through three theoretical post-mission disposal scenarios based on the Sentinel-1A mission parameters. The results are discussed against the propellant consumption needed in each case with the purpose of addressing potential 'burden shifting' that could occur between the Earth environment and the orbital one.

Life cycle assessment of emerging Ni-Co hydroxide charge storage electrodes: impact of graphene oxide and synthesis route.

Decoupling energy supply from fossil fuels through electrification and sustainable energy management requires efficient and environmentally low-impact energy storage technologies. Potential candidates are charge storage electrodes that combine nickel and cobalt hydroxides with reduced graphene oxide (rGO) designed to achieve high-energy, high-power density and long cycling lifetimes. An early eco-efficiency analysis of these electrodes seeks to examine the impacts of materials and processes used in the synthesis, specifically while focusing on the use of rGO. The emerging electrodes synthesized by means of electrodeposition, are further compared with electrodes obtained by an alternative synthesis route involving co-precipitation. Life cycle assessment (LCA) method was applied to compare a baseline nickel-cobalt hydroxide electrode (NCED), the focal electrode integrating rGO (NCED-rGO), and the benchmark co-precipitated electrode (NCCP), for delivering the charge of 1000 mA h. Contribution analysis reveals that the main environmental hotspots in the synthesis of the NCED-rGO are the use of electricity for potentiostat, ethanol for cleaning, and rGO. Results of comparison show significantly better performance of NCED-rGO in comparison to NCED across all impact categories, suggesting that improved functionalities by addition of rGO outweigh added impacts of the use of material itself. NCED-rGO is more impactful than NCCP except for the indicators of cumulative energy demand, climate change, and fossil depletion. To produce a functional equivalent for the three electrodes, total cumulative energy use was estimated to be 78 W h for NCED, 25 W h for NCED-rGO, and 35 W h for NCCP. Sensitivity analysis explores the significance of rGO efficiency uptake on the relative comparison with NCCP, and potential impact of rGO on the category of freshwater ecotoxicity given absence of removal from the process effluent. Scenario analysis further shows relative performance of the electrodes at the range of alternative functional parameters of current density and lifetime. Lastly, the environmental performance of NCED-rGO electrodes is discussed in regard to technology readiness level and opportunities for design improvements.

Evaluating nanotechnology opportunities and risks through integration of life-cycle and risk assessment.

It has been some 15 years since the topics of sustainability and nanotechnologies first appeared together in the scientific literature and became a focus of organizations' research and policy developments. On the one hand, this focus is directed towards approaches and tools for risk assessment and management and on the other hand towards life-cycle thinking and assessment. Comparable to their application for regular chemicals, each tool is seen to serve separate objectives as it relates to evaluating nanotechnologies' safety or resource efficiency, respectively. While nanomaterials may provide resource efficient production and consumption, this must balance any potential hazards they pose across their life-cycles. This Perspective advocates for integrating these two tools at the methodological level for achieving this objective, and it explains what advantages and challenges this offers decision-makers while highlighting what research is needed to further enhance integration.

Probabilistic risk assessment of emerging materials: case study of titanium dioxide nanoparticles.

The development and use of emerging technologies such as nanomaterials can provide both benefits and risks to society. Emerging materials may promise to bring many technological advantages but may not be well characterized in terms of their production volumes, magnitude of emissions, behaviour in the environment and effects on living organisms. This uncertainty can present challenges to scientists developing these materials and persons responsible for defining and measuring their adverse impacts. Human health risk assessment is a method of identifying the intrinsic hazard of and quantifying the dose-response relationship and exposure to a chemical, to finally determine the estimation of risk. Commonly applied deterministic approaches may not sufficiently estimate and communicate the likelihood of risks from emerging technologies whose uncertainty is large. Probabilistic approaches allow for parameters in the risk assessment process to be defined by distributions instead of single deterministic values whose uncertainty could undermine the value of the assessment. A probabilistic approach was applied to the dose-response and exposure assessment of a case study involving the production of nanoparticles of titanium dioxide in seven different exposure scenarios. Only one exposure scenario showed a statistically significant level of risk. In the latter case, this involved dumping high volumes of nano-TiO2 powders into an open vessel with no personal protection equipment. The probabilistic approach not only provided the likelihood of but also the major contributing factors to the estimated risk (e.g. emission potential).

Towards the integration of orbital space use in Life Cycle Impact Assessment.

A rising sustainability concern is occurring in the space sector: 29,000 human-made objects, larger than 10cm are orbiting the Earth but only 6% are operational spacecrafts. Today, space debris is today a significant and constant danger to all space missions. Consequently, it becomes compelled to design new space missions considering End-of-Life requirements in order to ensure the sustainable use of space orbits. Furthermore, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been identified by the European Space Agency as an adequate tool to measure the environmental impact of spacecraft missions. Hence, our challenge is to integrate orbital space use into Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) to broaden the scope of LCA for space systems. The generation of debris in the near-Earth's orbital regions leads to a decrease in volume availability. The Area-of-Protection (AoP) 'resources' seems to be the most relevant reflection of this depletion. To address orbital space use in a comprehensive way, we propose a first attempt at establishing an impact pathway linking outer space use to resources. This framework will be the basis for defining new indicator(s) related to orbital space use.

Toward meaningful end points of biodiversity in life cycle assessment.

Halting current rates of biodiversity loss will be a defining challenge of the 21st century. To assess the effectiveness of strategies to achieve this goal, indicators and tools are required that monitor the driving forces of biodiversity loss, the changing state of biodiversity, and evaluate the effectiveness of policy responses. Here, we review the use of indicators and approaches to model biodiversity loss in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a methodology used to evaluate the cradle-to-grave environmental impacts of products. We find serious conceptual shortcomings in the way models are constructed, with scale considerations largely absent. Further, there is a disproportionate focus on indicators that reflect changes in compositional aspects of biodiversity, mainly changes in species richness. Functional and structural attributes of biodiversity are largely neglected. Taxonomic and geographic coverage remains problematic, with the majority of models restricted to one or a few taxonomic groups and geographic regions. On a more general level, three of the five drivers of biodiversity loss as identified by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment are represented in current impact categories (habitat change, climate change and pollution), while two are missing (invasive species and overexploitation). However, methods across all drivers can be greatly improved. We discuss these issues and make recommendations for future research to better reflect biodiversity loss in LCA.

Life cycle assessment of two dwellings: one in Spain, a developed country, and one in Colombia, a country under development.

The main objective of this paper is to study and quantify the differences in energy consumption and environmental impacts of two dwellings during the full building life cycle: one in Spain, a developed country, and one in Colombia, a country under development. In both scenarios, we assessed the construction, use and end-of-life phases. Results show that the use phase in the Pamplona house (Colombia) represents a lower percentage for all impacts in the total than in the Barcelona house (Spain). The findings of this study showed that the difference in consumption in Colombia and Spanish dwellings analysed is not only due to the variation in results for bio-climatic differences but also because of the consumption habits in each country. The importance of consumption habits of citizens and the need to decouple socio-economic development from energy consumption are sought for achieving sustainability from a life cycle perspective. There is a crucial necessity to provide satisfaction to basic needs and comfort requirements of population with reasonable and sustainable energy consumption. Then, the type of standard dwelling varies substantially depending on the geographic location where it is built. Climate, technological, cultural, socio-economical differences clearly define the standard of a building in any context and in any region. However, the function is always the same, to provide protection and housing for its habitants.

Framework for the uncertainty assessment in the impact pathway analysis with an application on a local scale in Spain.

The estimation of damage estimates due to air emissions gives important basic knowledge for decision-making on the level of environmental politics and business strategies. Nowadays, a frequently applied method to estimate environmental damages is the Impact Pathway Analysis (IPA), which can be easily carried out using models such as EcoSense or PathWays. These models produce results in a relatively short term. However, there is a lack of reliability in the results. As in many other environmental software tools, the uncertainty is the key problem that makes it difficult to convince decision-makers by the outcomes of a study. Therefore, a framework that allows assessing the uncertainties within studies in which the IPA is applied on a local scale has been developed. In this assessment framework, the uncertainties of the used parameters, including their spatial and temporal variability, are taken into account. As the model is processing a huge quantity of data, one step of the assessment consists of a screening procedure to determine the parameters that are supposed to be fixed. For the other data, probability distributions have to be selected and classified into two groups: extensively available data for which average and standard deviation can be calculated and data based on little information. A quantification of the uncertainty can be completed by a stochastic model in the form of Monte Carlo (MC) simulation on the basis of the framework. As an illustration of the framework, we have applied it to a study on the installation of an advanced gas treatment in the municipal waste incinerator of Tarragona. It can be shown that the presented stochastic approach gives a lower geometric deviation than the analytical one and that the new gas treatment reduces the environmental damages without any doubt.