Finding new applications and paths for Industrial Ecology

The field of industrial ecology is constantly growing and evolving, creating new ways to analyse the flow of energy and materials, and to imagine our economy through ecological concepts and insights. The lab is constantly reviewing new developments in the field, and aims to contribute to its usefulness both in scholarly research, and to environmental practitioners in the public and the private sector.

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Going beyond Life Cycle Inventory

 

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) for an overwhelming portion of products and services must draw on estimates of the environmental impacts of potable water. Close to a hundred LCAs have been published characterizing the impacts of water supply systems. The great diversity of water systems and their locations leads to diversity of environmental impacts which depends on local conditions.

 

However, extensive LCI databases that are site specific do not exist. Thus, in the absence of localized Life Cycle Inventories (LCIs), most analyses draw their impact figures for water from one of a few standard life cycle inventories, the applicability of which to a given local case is uncertain. In this study a comprehensive and rigorous review of LCAs of  water supply systems and sub-systems has been performed, to better understand the sources of variation in these studies, and identify those elements of the water-supply system with the consistently highest environmental impacts.

 

Harmonization has been carried out rigorously, utilizing a systematic differentiation of the subsystems, functional units, and system boundaries referenced in over 100 candidate studies, to produce a comparable subset of 32 LCA studies.  Statistical techniques (cluster analysis and analysis of variance) were used to isolate and validate the main causes of variation and the sub-systems in which these are most pronounced. The study clearly indicates the large environmental impact of desalination, and shows the presence or absence of desalination (and thermal desalination in particular) as a determinant of the environmental impacts of water supply systems, with other factors in a secondary role.

 

Our results show the importance of LCA analysis that goes beyond standard LCI databases to consider the local contexts of water production, and points the way to doing so without conducting a localized analysis in each case. Given the large variation we describe in the impacts of water supply systems (from 0.12 to 3.4 Kg CO2-eq/m3 of supplied water), an  LCA of water-intensive products drawing from a standard LCI databases could be substantially inaccurate in different settings, especially in a region with desalination--an uncertainty that can be reduced considerably by taking this into account.

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Novel Global Dynamic Consequential Material Flow Analysis (MFA)

case study: Lithium-ion battery's industrial ecology; Lithium, Phosphorus, and Iron recovery from Liquid Waste Streams as part of the transformation to circular economy.

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