Tomas Rydberg, IVL Swedish Environmental Institute, is Senior Researcher at IVL in the areas of Sustainable production, Energy and resource efficiency, LCA and Environmental Management. He is one of the pioneering researchers in Sweden in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Management, and Chemicals substitution, from the 1990-s and onwards, with over 30 peer-reviewed publications. Serving as a research leader in SSbD projects, thus contributing to Sustainability Assessments in many research projects, he currently leads the Life Cycle Management work package in the Swedish Mistra Safechem research program, as well as being co-activity leader on SSbD case studies in the EU-wide PARC project. Further, Tomas leads the Technical Secretariat in the ProScale consortium, developing an approach for toxicity and eco-toxicity impact potential assessment for application in an LCA context in early phases of innovation such as SSbD.
LCA Sustainability assessments in SSbD
Sustainability assessments in SSbD are outlined to consist of assessments regarding Environmental, Economic and Social aspects of the innovation under investigation. Sometimes this is formalized to consist of (Environmental) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social Life Cycle Assessment, (S-LCA). The current session will focus on the environmental assessment (LCA) but will also briefly introduce the economic and social aspects. LCA is a methodology aimed at evaluating the potential environmental impacts of products, processes, and services across their full life cycle, where processes are connected by mass or energy flows. Standardized in the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 14040 standards series it distinguishes four phases: i) Goal and scope definition, ii) creation of the life cycle inventory (LCI), iii) life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) and iv) interpretation. In SSbD, a specific challenge for the LCA practitioner, which also extends to the overall sustainability assessment, is the need to do the assessment at as low TRL as possible, when synthesis routes and processes are only known in lab scale. The approach applied in LCA is referred to as prospective LCA, and is typically useful in an intermediate TRL. For really low TRL levels, qualitative approaches such as discussion with experts or questionnaire based approaches. At higher TRLs, more descriptive approaches can be applied. In the session, an overview of the different LCA approaches along the TRL sequence will be provided.