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Life cycle assessment (LCA) has come a long way in the past few years, evolving from a niche activity carried out by academics and a few forward-thinking businesses to a mainstream practice talked about publicly by Fortune 500 companies. 

But there is still some confusion about what LCA is, what it's good (and not so good) for, and where it might be headed. 

What follows here are 10 facts -- and a few opinions -- to help shed some light on this exciting young field.

1.  LCA is a tool in a growing field called Industrial Ecology

Industrial Ecology seeks to redefine the global economy from the old paradigm of open loop systems  (linear flows of materials where resources are extracted, goods are produced and used, and waste products are disposed) to closed loop models (the goal of which is to mimic nature, where the wastes from one product are the raw materials for another). 

2.  Think "cradle-to-grave," or ideally, "cradle-to-cradle"

LCA is a "cradle-to-grave" (or, ideally, cradle to cradle) accounting of the key environmental impacts of products and services.
To perform an LCA, you essentially sum up all of the material and energy inputs to the production, use, and disposal of a product; then sum up all of the outputs (air and water emissions, materials, and waste) from each phase; and interpret the results in terms of impacts on human health, ecosystems quality, and resource depletion.

3. LCA is often performed to determine the impact of consumer products 

Though there are many uses for LCA, consumer products have long been a prominent target for practitioners. There can be many reasons for this, but it seems likely that it is a response to the growing consumer demand for environmentally-responsible products. The increasing prevalence of product carbon footprints (see next bullet) is a good example of this phenomenon.

4. A product carbon footprint is a type of LCA

There are many ways that LCA can "quantify" the environmental impact of products.  One such method is the product carbon footprint, which is really an LCA that focuses on climate change impacts.  The increasing prevalence of carbon footprinting can only be good news, as so-called supply chain carbon (that is, carbon emissions that occur outside the direct control of the company selling the final product) make up a very large percentage of the emissions associated with the goods we buy and sell every day.

5. To do an LCA the right way, you need to know (and communicate) the "What" and the "Why"

Why are you performing an LCA?  Is it intended for use only inside your organization to make improvements to a product?  Or are you intending to "go public" with your findings and make an environmental claim?  And what will you be evaluating?  Is it a single, consumer facing item (like a can of soda), or is it an entire product line (such as carbonated beverages)?  Also, what year will you be evaluating (most recent is always best)?  These are the kind of questions you'll need to answer when you state the "What and the Why" of your study (technically called the Goal and Scope), the first stage of any LCA.

After the LCI is compiled, the inputs and outputs are interpreted to broadly explain their effect on key environmental categories -- the usual suspects are human health, ecosystem quality, and resource depletion. This part of the LCA is known as life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), and is used by decision makers to make choices about how to lessen the environmental effects of the evaluated product.  So, for example, while the LCI might tell us how many grams of different greenhouse gases are emitted across a product's life cycle, the LCIA would go a step further and quantify the global warming potential of all those emissions. 

9. Interpretation

Once the life cycle inventory and assessment are finished (these are usually accomplished with the help of software tools, which are proliferating at a rapid rate), it's left to the human practitioner to frame the results. Questions such as which impact categories to emphasize the most (human health is a common choice) and which processes to focus on for improvement need to be decided. Answers to these questions are often highly subjective, and depend upon many things, such as the priorities of the organization performing the LCA, the target audience, and other issues decided in the Goal and Scope phase.

10. LCA is what we make of it

LCA is a powerful tool to help us understand the impacts of the products we make and use. But like any tool, it can be used in many different ways, some of them not so helpful. If, for example, we evaluate a "bad" product and use LCA to improve its impact incrementally, we still might not realize the true aim of our work -- the production of goods and services that do not hinder the ability of current future generations to provide for themselves. In other words, only in the context of broader sustainability goals can LCA do what it was created to do -- help to enable the creation of truly green economy.

Scott Kaufman is a senior manager at the Carbon Trust and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, where he teaches a course in Industrial Ecology and Life Cycle Assesment (LCA).

Brewer Adnams is set to provide enough gas to heat 235 homes a year by converting brewery and local food waste.

The Suffolk-based company has constructed the first UK anaerobic digestion plant to use such materials to create biomethane.

This will provide gas to use at the brewery and to inject into the National Grid.

It has teamed up with British Gas and the National Grid for the project and will start pumping renewable gas into the grid later this summer.

Chief executive Andy Wood said: “For a number of years now Adnams has been investing in ways to reduce our impact on the environment.

“The reality of being able to convert our own brewing waste and local food waste to power Adnams brewery and vehicles as well as the wider community is very exciting.”

Biomethane is similar to natural gas and according to National Grid could account for 15 per cent of the domestic supply by 2020.

The construction industry has recently begun to look at a variety of manufactured nanomaterials as a way to advance conventional construction materials, according to this article. Nanomaterials could help the construction industry enhance material properties as well as reduce energy consumption. Commercial buildings and residential houses use 41 percent of all the energy consumed in the United States. Scientists at Rice University, United States, have completed a review that looks at the benefits of using nanomaterials in construction materials and highlights the potentially harmful aspects of releasing nanomaterials into the environment. The review contains a list of current uses of nanomaterials in various building applications and highlights potential and promising future uses. The authors state that "[W]hether nanoenabled construction materials could be designed to be "safe" and still display the properties that make them useful is an outstanding question," and suggest that adopting principles of industrial ecology and pollution prevention should be a high priority to prevent environmental pollution and the associated impacts. Substances should be re-engineered to create safer, greener, and yet effective products, the authors say. They conclude by emphasizing the potential of manufactured nanomaterials in the construction industry to harvest solar or other forms of renewable energy, and as substitutes for materials such as lead and mercury that can become harmful environmental pollutants. The article and a link to the review can be found online at the link below.

The original article may still be available at www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=17138.php

Most farmers are painfully aware that corn prices have been trending down for much of this spring, even as the ethanol industry recovers and expands its use of the grain to make fuel.

California doesn't know. At least officially, at the California Air Resources Board, or CARB. CARB is in charge of a state law that aims to lower the carbon emissions from fuels 10% by 2020. Last year CARB ranked the "carbon intensity" of fuels and used a controversial theory on indirect land use that had the effect of making gasoline look greener than Midwest corn ethanol. The theory assumes that an expanding ethanol industry will raise grain prices and lead to tropical savannas and rainforests being cleared for crop production.

No one disputes that clearing tropical forests puts a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. That's why Indonesia, a relatively poor country, ranks third behind China and the U.S. among the planet's top greenhouse gas producers. Indonesia is a major producer of timber and paper and has been converting rain forests and tropical peat bogs to palm oil production.

But the science of calculating how biofuels fit into the equation is new and still uncertain. This Thursday CARB will hear from a Purdue University economist, Wally Tyner, who led a team that refined a computer model for a report that shows ethanol has a much smaller effect than originally believed.

"Sometimes I tell people this whole land use issue has only been around for three years," Tyner told Agriculture.com in a recent interview. "Over the last 14 months, we learned a lot about the kind of data we need and the parameters."

Tyner's latest computer analysis comes up with at least a 10% cut in greenhouse gases from ethanol over gasoline, even including indirect land use.

Tyner will talk about a report that he and others released this spring for the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. Tyner is a member of the CARB Expert Working Group.

Economic computer modeling might seem like a dry subject, but it's a big deal to the ethanol industry.

California represents nearly a tenth of the nation's market for ethanol, said Geoff Cooper, vice president of the Renewable Fuels Association. New rules for blending fuel in California take effect next January and gasoline suppliers are already making decisions based on a low carbon fuel standard that the state adopted last year.

"They're going to be looking for biofuels that generate credits that help lower the carbon intensity of their fuel blends," Cooper told Agriculture.com. Current rules favor ethanol made in California and Brazilian sugar cane ethanol over corn-based ethanol from the Midwest.

That's why the RFA has asked CARB to give credit to Tyner's work right away, even though CARB has until December to make any changes it its low carbon fuel standard.

RFA considers the whole concept of indirect land use flawed and, along with another trade group, Growth Energy, is challenging CARB's low carbon fuel standard in court.

"One thing I want to make clear is that us pushing CARB to adopt the new Purdue numbers is not an endorsement of the concept (of indirect land use) in any way," Cooper said.

Mark Stowers, vice president for research and development at POET, the world's largest ethanol producer, is another industry member of CARB's Expert Working Group. He, too, is skeptical of the validity of earlier estimates of the effect of ethanol on land use in other nations.

"I think CARB needs to look at a two-year moratorium and let the science settle out," Stowers told Agriculture.com recently.

Tyner's estimate of the effect of land use changes on greenhouse gas emissions from ethanol is only about 13% as much as the first estimate published in Science magazine by Tim Searchinger and others. And it's about half as much as CARB estimated last year.

Tyner said there are several reasons why the new computer modeling cut ethanol's impact.

The original Searchinger paper didn't account for distillers grains from ethanol, making the loss of corn for feed seem greater than it is. Tyner's estimate does. It also gives more credit for the productivity of pasture and marginal land that would be converted to crops as ethanol uses more corn. Previous reports estimated that marginal land converted to crops would be only about two-thirds as productive as prime land.

"In many areas of Brazil, for example, it's closer to one," Tyner said.

As experts and CARB debate the carbon footprint of ethanol, the industry isn't standing still.

At least half-a-dozen plants have applied to CARB for approval of ethanol production processes (called a pathway by CARB) that are more efficient at conserving energy and carbon, said Cooper of the RFA.

One is Corn Plus, a farmer-owned plant in Winnebago, Minnesota, that gets part of its electricity from two windmills and which burns part of the soluble portion of distillers grains for heat.

Last year CARB gave Midwest corn ethanol a "carbon intensity" of 99.4 (above gasoline's 95.86).

Keith Kor, manager of Corn Plus, said his plant has hired a consultant to do a life cycle analysis for its own carbon intensity rating.

It may be as low as 72, "which basically would be the same as Brazilian sugarcane ethanol," Kor said.

POET, too, is a major innovator.

At the Fuel Ethanol Workshop in St. Louis today, it released its own life cycle analysis of cellolusic ethanol that will be produced at its corn ethanol plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa.

According to an independent analysis of POET's Project Liberty, the cellulosic ethanol will lower carbon emissions by 111% compared to gasoline. It will actually have negative emissions, offsetting more carbon than it releases. The plant will use corn cobs and the upper 25% of corn stover for its feedstock.

"Not only is cellulosic ethanol a clean and safe alternative fuel, in cases such as Project Liberty, it can literally reverse some of the effects of our nation's dependence on fossil energy such as oil," POET CEO Jeff Broin said. "By expanding the number of sources for ethanol production, the entire nation can contribute to helping our nation's economy, security and environment through alternative fuel production."

Broin gave the results to reporters today. A lifecycle analysis tracks the emissions of ethanol production from "field to tank." It includes emissions from planting and harvest, feedstock transportation, conversion to ethanol, waste products, co-products and transportation of the ethanol. It also includes Environmental Protection Agency calculations for changes in land use and effects on agriculture inputs.

Waste from the cellulosic plant will produce biogas, which will be used to help power an existing corn ethanol plant next to the cellulosic plant.

Click here for details on the POET announcement.

Click here for the full report of Wally Tyner's research, Land Use Changes and Consequent CO2 Emissions due to U.S. Corn Ethanol Production: A Comprehensive Analysis.

Eco-friendly or clean production prevents all forms of pollution, in order to reduce risks for health and the environment, while improving the competitiveness and economic viability of businesses.

Funded by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), this project aims at strengthening capacities of the National Clean Production Centre (NCPC) in terms of resources efficient and clean production (RECP).

The TCPP which is part is part of implementing the second phase of the UNIDO’s integrated technical co-operation program with Tunisia, is structured around two main axes.

The first aims at strengthening the capacity of national skills in terms of dissemination of the concept of cleaner production, through training of 25 Tunisian national experts in the master of the basic tools of cleaner production and innovative concepts (industrial ecology, analysis of life’s cycle, social responsibility, Eco-label) and accompanying 75 industrial companies and hotels for the implementation of cleaner production tools.

The second axis, aims at putting up a  network of the Tunisian CNPP with its counterparts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to promote technology transfer and knowledge on cleaner production.

To this end, a knowledge management system (KMS) will be established to promote the exchange of information and expertise between countries of the region.

The targeted sectors are textiles, leather and footwear, food, hotels, engineering, electrical and chemical industries.

Mr. Nadhir Hamada stressed that the project, which is part of the national objectives in of environmental upgrading, will help enterprises reduce their consumption of raw materials, water and energy, while increasing their competitiveness.

Other factors mentioned by the Minister, including benchmarking studies conducted nationally in this sector, which revealed the interest for Tunisian companies of clean products.

In a related event, Mr. Nadhir Hamada, held on Thursday a conference on “national and regional planning and the fight against the challenges of climate change and desertification”, in which he said that Tunisia implemented projects aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gas, the main cause of climate change.

He mentioned in this context, the adoption by the National Clean Development Mechanism Office of 37projects in the sector of energy efficiency, exploitation of renewable energy in addition to the strengthening of the Tunis railway network, the reduction of emissions of phosphate sector and control of waste management.