Early-stage Quantitative Sustainability Assessment: Approaches for Policy, Processes and Materials

About this Research Topic

Background

In the last two decades, life cycle assessment (LCA) and other quantitative sustainability assessment methods have gained increasing recognition as decision-support tools to help organizations make informed decisions concerning the environmental footprint of products, processes and services.
So far, a majority of LCA studies have been retrospective in nature, as they analyze the impacts of existing systems. Such ex-post studies certainly provide valuable insights on the environmental consequences of current technologies and practices, however the full potential of methods such as LCA to steer industry and society towards environmentally sound solutions is realized when the assessment of new products, technologies and initiatives is performed ex-ante, i.e., in the earliest stages of development.

Then, such an early assessment provides the greatest opportunity to influence decision-making while the organizational effort and the financial cost to change the course of a project might still be relatively low. Accordingly, research programs such as Horizon Europe are going to require funded projects to prove already in their conception the sustainability of their proposed innovations compared to existing benchmarks.

It is thus clear that the frontier of quantitative sustainability assessment lays in its prospective or ex-ante application. However, when applying quantitative sustainability assessment in the early design stages of materials, processes and policies, new challenges arise.

• For novel materials, their environmental impacts depend on their potential performance in commercial applications, which has to be inferred from often limited data, collected in controlled conditions in laboratory environments. In addition, such assessments need to consider a (future) scale-up of the synthesis procedure of these materials and the modelling of uncertain end-of-life impacts.
• For innovative processes, an analysis of related, prospective environmental impacts implies envisioning a realistic scenario for industrial deployment that in principle should take into account e.g. opportunities of energy integration and technological learning.
• For policies of environmental interest (e.g. decisions on which technology subside in the energy and mobility sectors, the allocation of resources in research programs, the planning of waste management systems), the challenge is in forecasting future scenarios to assess policy alternatives, with due consideration of several intertwining effects.

Thus, the here presented Research Topic aims to offer a compendium of cutting-edge research in the field of prospective quantitative sustainability assessments, covering both methodological advances and relevant case studies.
For this, the Research Topic welcomes contributions that discuss opportunities and challenges of the ex-ante quantitative sustainability assessment of materials, processes and policies, including topical issues such as, but not limited to:

• Methodological frameworks for the analysis of the future impacts of novel materials or emerging technologies currently at their early development stages (i.e. TRL < 6);
• Streamlined estimate approaches or guidelines on the use of proxy data and/or processes in order to fill information gaps when performing quantitative assessments at early stages of a project;
• Methodologies and recommendations for the integration of specialist expertise (such as e.g. process engineering, economics, toxicology, and others) in order to increase the robustness and the coverage of ex-ante sustainability assessments;
• Modelling of End-of-Life impacts of novel materials and products;
• Approaches for the consideration of market-mediated effects in ex-ante sustainability assessments;
• Systematic integration of futures scenarios in background datasets in databases (e.g. approaches for the combination of prospective LCA and integrated assessment modelling);
• Management of the uncertainty owing to incomplete information when performing quantitative sustainability assessments at the early stage of projects;
• Need to expand the portfolio of impact assessment methods to better include emerging issues (e.g. plastics pollution, biological hazard);
• Methodological advancements and/or finalized case studies for the integration of social and economic pillars in ex-ante sustainability assessment;
• Methodological advancements and/or finalized case studies related to the contextualization of early-stage systems in the near future considering the evolution of society, policies and economy;
• Successful examples of application and case studies in the use of LCA and/or other sustainability metrics to guide the early development of novel materials and processes;
• Critical discussion of the potential and the limitations of ex-ante sustainability assessment approaches in specific sectors

Keywords: life cycle assessment, early integration, methodology, quantitative sustainability assessment, policies, materials, processes

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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