Emerging technologies are expected to contribute to environmental sustainable development. However, throughout the development of novel technologies, it is unknown whether emerging technologies can lead to reduced environmental impacts compared to a potentially displaced mature technology. Additionally, process steps suspected to be environmental hotspots can be improved by process engineers early in the development of the emerging technology. In order to determine the environmental impacts of emerging technologies at an early stage of development, prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) should be performed. However, consistency in prospective LCA methodology is lacking. Therefore, this article develops a framework for a prospective LCA in order to overcome the methodological inconsistencies regarding prospective LCAs. The methodological framework was developed using literature on prospective LCAs of emerging technologies, and therefore, a literature review on prospective LCAs was conducted. We found 44 case studies, four review papers, and 17 papers on methodological guidance. Three main challenges for conducting prospective LCAs are identified: Comparability, data, and uncertainty challenges. The issues in defining the aim, functionality, and system boundaries of the prospective LCAs, as well as problems with specifying LCIA methodologies, comprise the comparability challenge. Data availability, quality, and scaling are issues within the data challenge. Finally, uncertainty exists as an overarching challenge when applying a prospective LCA. These three challenges are especially crucial for the prospective assessment of emerging technologies. However, this review also shows that within the methodological papers and case studies, several approaches exist to tackle these challenges. These approaches were systematically summarized within a framework to give guidance on how to overcome the issues when conducting prospective LCAs of emerging technologies. Accordingly, this framework is useful for LCA practitioners who are analyzing early-stage technologies. Nevertheless, further research is needed to develop appropriate scale-up schemes and to include uncertainty analyses for a more in-depth interpretation of results.

The use of bagasse and trash from sugarcane fields in ethanol production is supposed to increase the ethanol yield per hectare, to reduce the energy demand, greenhouse gas emissions, and other environmental impacts. In this article, different technological options of ethanol production are investigated and quantified looking at potential environmental impacts. The first-generation ethanol from sugarcane is compared to stand-alone second-generation ethanol as well as an integrated first- and second-generation ethanol production.

Purpose: Products made of plastic often appear to have lower environmental impacts than alternatives. However, present life cycle assessments (LCA) do not consider possible risks caused by the emission of plastics into the environment. Following the precautionary principle, we propose characterization factors (CFs) for plastic emissions allowing to calculate impacts of plastic pollution measured in plastic pollution equivalents, based on plastics’ residence time in the environment. Methods and materials: The method addresses the definition and quantification of plastic emissions in LCA and estimates their fate in the environment based on their persistence. According to our approach, the fate is mainly influenced by the environmental compartment the plastic is initially emitted to, its redistribution to other compartments, and its degradation speed. The latter depends on the polymer type’s specific surface degradation rate (SSDR), the emission’s shape, and its characteristic length. The SSDRs are derived from an extensive literature review. Since the data quality of the SSDR and redistribution rates varies, an uncertainty assessment is carried out based on the pedigree matrix approach. To quantify the fate factor (FF), we calculate the area below the degradation curve of an emission and call it residence time $${\tau }_{R}$$τ R . Results and discussion: The results of our research include degradation measurements (SSDRs) retrieved from literature, a surface-driven degradation model, redistribution patterns, FFs based on the residence time, and an uncertainty analysis of the suggested FFs. Depending on the applied time horizon, the values of the FFs range from near zero to values greater than 1000 for different polymer types, size classes, shapes, and initial compartments. Based on the comparison of the compartment-specific FFs with the total compartment-weighted FFs, the polymer types can be grouped into six clusters. The proposed FFs can be used as CFs which can be further developed by integrating the probability of the exposure of humans or organisms to the plastic emission (exposure factor) and for the impacts of plastics on species (effect factor). Conclusions: The proposed methodology is intended to support (plastic) product designers, for example, regarding materials’ choice, and can serve as a first proxy to estimate potential risks caused by plastic emissions. Besides, the FFs can be used to develop new CFs, which can be linked to one or more existing impact categories, such as human toxicity or ecotoxicity, or new impact categories addressing, for example, potential risks caused by entanglement.

In light of the debate on the circular economy, the EU strategy for plastics, and several national regulations, such as the German Packaging Act, polymeric foam materials as well as hybrid packaging (multilayered plastic) are now in focus. To understand the environmental impacts of various tray solutions for meat packaging, a comparative environmental assessment was conducted. As an environmental assessment method, a life cycle assessment (LCA) was applied following the ISO standards 14040/44. The nine packaging solutions investigated were: PS-based trays (extruded polystyrene and extruded polystyrene with five-layered structure containing ethylene vinyl alcohol), PET-based trays (recycled polyethylene terephthalate, with and without polyethylene layer, and amorphous polyethylene terephthalate), polypropylene (PP) and polylactic acid (PLA). The scope of the LCA study included the production of the tray and the end-of-life stage. The production of meat, the filling of the tray with meat and the tray sealing were not taken into account. The results show that the PS-based trays, especially the mono material solutions made of extruded polystyrene (XPS), show the lowest environmental impact across all 12 impact categories except for resource depletion. Multilayer products exhibit higher environmental impacts. The LCA also shows that the end-of-life stage has an important influence on the environmental performance of trays. However, the production of the trays dominates the overall results. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis illustrates that, even if higher recycling rates were realised in the future, XPS based solutions would still outperform the rest from an environmental perspective.

Sustaining value after the end-of-life to improve products’ circularity and sustainability has attracted an increasing number of industrial actors, policymakers, and researchers. Medical products are considered to have great remanufacturing potential because they are often designated as single-use products and consist of various complex materials that cannot be reused and are not significant in municipal recycling infrastructure. The remanufacturing of electrophysiology catheters is a well-established process guaranteeing equivalent quality compared to virgin-produced catheters. In order to measure if using a remanufactured product is environmentally beneficial compared to using a virgin product, life cycle assessment (LCA) is often used. However, focusing on one life cycle to inform on the environmental-beneficial use fails to guide policymakers from a system perspective. This study analyzes the environmental consequences of electrophysiology catheters considering two modeling perspectives, the implementation of LCA, including a cut-off approach and combining LCA and a circularity indicator measuring multiple life cycles. Investigating the LCA results of using a remanufactured as an alternative to a newly-manufactured catheter shows that the global warming impact is reduced by 50.4% and the abiotic resource use by 28.8%. The findings from the system perspective suggest that the environmental savings increase with increasing collection rates of catheters.