Addressing temporal considerations in life cycle assessment.

In life cycle assessment (LCA), temporal considerations are usually lost during the life cycle inventory calculation, resulting in an aggregated "snapshot" of potential impacts. Disregarding such temporal considerations has previously been underlined as an important source of uncertainty, but a growing number of approaches have been developed to tackle this issue. Nevertheless, their adoption by LCA practitioners is still uncommon, which raises concerns about the representativeness of current LCA results.

Assessment of environmental impacts and operational costs of the implementation of an innovative source-separated urine treatment.

Innovative treatment technologies and management methods are necessary to valorise the constituents of wastewater, in particular nutrients from urine (highly concentrated and can have significant impacts related to artificial fertilizer production). The FP7 project, ValuefromUrine, proposed a new two-step process (called VFU) based on struvite precipitation and microbial electrolysis cell (MEC) to recover ammonia, which is further transformed into ammonium sulphate. The environmental and economic impacts of its prospective implementation in the Netherlands were evaluated based on life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology and operational costs.

Cost versus life cycle assessment-based environmental impact optimization of drinking water production plants.

Empowering decision makers with cost-effective solutions for reducing industrial processes environmental burden, at both design and operation stages, is nowadays a major worldwide concern. The paper addresses this issue for the sector of drinking water production plants (DWPPs), seeking for optimal solutions trading-off operation cost and life cycle assessment (LCA)-based environmental impact while satisfying outlet water quality criteria. This leads to a challenging bi-objective constrained optimization problem, which relies on a computationally expensive intricate process-modelling simulator of the DWPP and has to be solved with limited computational budget.

Assessment of Life Cycle Impacts on Ecosystem Services: Promise, Problems, and Prospects.

The analysis of ecosystem services (ES) is becoming a key-factor to implement policies on sustainable technologies. Accordingly, life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods are more and more oriented toward the development of harmonized characterization models to address impacts on ES. However, such efforts are relatively recent and have not reached full consensus yet.

Machine learning for toxicity characterization of organic chemical emissions using USEtox database: Learning the structure of the input space.

Toxicity characterization of chemical emissions in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a complex task which usually proceeds via multimedia (fate, exposure and effect) models attached to models of dose-response relationships to assess the effects on target. Different models and approaches do exist, but all require a vast amount of data on the properties of the chemical compounds being assessed, which are hard to collect or hardly publicly available (especially for thousands of less common or newly developed chemicals), therefore hampering in practice the assessment in LCA. An example is USEtox, a consensual model for the characterization of human toxicity and freshwater ecotoxicity.

Environmental assessment of digestate treatment technologies using LCA methodology.

The production of biogas from energy crops, organic waste and manure has augmented considerably the amounts of digestate available in Flanders. This has pushed authorities to steadily introduce legislative changes to promote its use as a fertilising agent. There is limited arable land in Flanders, which entails that digestate has to compete with animal manure to be spread.

Combining agent-based modeling and life cycle assessment for the evaluation of mobility policies.

This article presents agent-based modeling (ABM) as a novel approach for consequential life cycle assessment (C-LCA) of large scale policies, more specifically mobility-related policies. The approach is validated at the Luxembourgish level (as a first case study). The agent-based model simulates the car market (sales, use, and dismantling) of the population of users in the period 2013-2020, following the implementation of different mobility policies and available electric vehicles.

Implications of a consumer-based perspective for the estimation of GHG emissions. The illustrative case of Luxembourg.

The Kyoto protocol has established an accounting system for national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions according to a geographic criterion (producer perspective), such as that proposed by the IPCC guidelines for national GHG inventories. However, the representativeness of this approach is still being debated, because the role of final consumers (consumer perspective) is not considered in the emission allocation system. This paper explores the usefulness of a hybrid analysis, including input-output (IO) and process inventory data, as a complementary tool for estimating and allocating national GHG emissions according to both consumer- and producer-based perspectives.

Development of USEtox characterisation factors for dishwasher detergents using data made available under REACH.

Because of the more and more stringent regulations and customer demand, dishwasher detergent manufacturers are constantly improving the composition of the products towards better environmental performances. In order to quantify the pros and cons of these changes on the lifecycle of detergents, as compared to conventional products, the use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a meaningful opportunity. However, the application of the methodology is hampered by the lack of Characterisation Factors (CFs) relative to the specific chemical substances included in the detergents composition, which cannot be included in the impact assessment of the effluent discharge.

Emergy evaluation using the calculation software SCALE: case study, added value and potential improvements.

This paper reports the emergy-based evaluation (EME) of the ecological performance of four water treatment plants (WTPs) using three different approaches. The results obtained using the emergy calculation software SCALE (EMESCALE) are compared with those achieved through a conventional emergy evaluation procedure (EMECONV), as well as through the application of the Solar Energy Demand (SED) method. SCALE's results are based on a detailed representation of the chain of technological processes provided by the lifecycle inventory database ecoinvent®.

Integrated earth system dynamic modeling for life cycle impact assessment of ecosystem services.

Despite the increasing awareness of our dependence on Ecosystem Services (ES), Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) does not explicitly and fully assess the damages caused by human activities on ES generation. Recent improvements in LCIA focus on specific cause-effect chains, mainly related to land use changes, leading to Characterization Factors (CFs) at the midpoint assessment level. However, despite the complexity and temporal dynamics of ES, current LCIA approaches consider the environmental mechanisms underneath ES to be independent from each other and devoid of dynamic character, leading to constant CFs whose representativeness is debatable.

Applying consequential LCA to support energy policy: land use change effects of bioenergy production.

Luxembourg aims at complying with the EU objective of attaining a 14% use of bioenergy in the national grid by 2020. The increase of biomethane production from energy crops could be a valuable option in achieving this objective. However, the overall environmental benefit of such option is yet to be proven.

Ecological deficit and use of natural capital in Luxembourg from 1995 to 2009.

Scarcity of natural resources and productive land is a global issue affecting the provision of goods and services at the country scale. This is particularly true for small regions with highly developed economies such as Luxembourg, which usually balance the chronic unavailability of resources (in particular with regard to fossil fuels) with an increasing demand of imported raw materials, energy and manufactured commodities. Based on historical time-series analysis (from 1995 to 2009), this paper determines the state of natural capital (NC) utilization in Luxembourg and estimates its ecological deficit (ED).

Cost-performance indicator for comparative environmental assessment of water treatment plants.

To compare potable water production plants on the basis of the environmental impacts generated by the treatment, including water resource depletion, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is often used as referential. A comparison based only on the environmental impacts can however be misleading. Criteria for drinkability are usually defined as thresholds and the actual water quality gain achieved by different treatment chains shall be considered in the assessment for a fair comparison.

Comparative and integrative environmental assessment of advanced wastewater treatment processes based on an average removal of pharmaceuticals.

Pharmaceuticals are normally barely removed by conventional wastewater treatments. Advanced technologies as a post-treatment, could prevent these pollutants reaching the environment and could be included in a centralized treatment plant or, alternatively, at the primary point source, e.g.

Is it better to remove pharmaceuticals in decentralized or conventional wastewater treatment plants? A life cycle assessment comparison.

After ingestion, pharmaceuticals are excreted unchanged or metabolized. They subsequently arrive in conventional wastewater treatment plants and are then released into the environment, often without undergoing any degradation. Conventional treatment plants can be upgraded with post treatment, alternatively the removal of pharmaceuticals could be achieved directly at point sources.

Elimination of pharmaceutical residues in biologically pre-treated hospital wastewater using advanced UV irradiation technology: a comparative assessment.

UV irradiation technology as a membrane bioreactor (MBR) post-treatment was investigated and assessed. Both UV low pressure (LP) and medium pressure (MP) lamps were examined. The technology was installed in a pilot plant treating hospital wastewater to provide the study with adequate field data.

Improvements to Emergy evaluations by using Life Cycle Assessment.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a widely recognized, multicriteria and standardized tool for environmental assessment of products and processes. As an independent evaluation method, emergy assessment has shown to be a promising and relatively novel tool. The technique has gained wide recognition in the past decade but still faces methodological difficulties which prevent it from being accepted by a broader stakeholder community.

Life cycle assessment of oriented strand boards (OSB): from process innovation to ecodesign.

Oriented strand boards (OSBs) are wood panels that are used worldwide mainly in the packaging and the building sectors. Their market share is rapidly increasing thanks to their outstanding mechanical properties and to a renewed interest for wood based products. The OSB production process generates, nonetheless, emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during the air-drying of wood strands.

Life cycle assessment of ecological sanitation system for small-scale wastewater treatment.

Ecological sanitation (EcoSan) concepts, relying on an environmentally sound management of water, nutrient and energy fluxes, have been poorly characterized in literature and are widely ignored by public planning authorities, architects or engineers. A comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of an EcoSan system at an office building and of conventional systems was carried out in order to provide practical data and information to (partially) fill this gap. Compared to conventional systems, EcoSan can reduce the contribution to ecosystem quality damage by more than 60%.