Life Cycle Assessment Prognosis for Sustainability

Today, along with the increasing environmental awareness in the politic, public and industries, the demand on environmentally friendly products and technologies has been increasing. Therefore within the research and development of a product or technology in industries as well as in national or international funded R&D activities the method of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is often implemented in order to evaluate the potential environmental performance of a product or a technical system. At an early stage of a development a LCA analysis enables a cost and time effective improvement of environmental performances (so called “Design for Environment"– DfE). Although LCA is a well established method, there are still aspects, which should be discussed further on. Especially in the context of the process development questions arise: does the LCA result based on a pilot plant represent that of a large scale plant? If not, how large is the potential derivation between the process plants at different stage of development? Today, there has been no systematic procedure established which answers these questions. Hence a systematic integration of the aspects of process development in LCA were not conducted so far. A method, which is currently on development at the LBP (Chair of Building Physics) of University of Stuttgart, will establish a systematic procedure for a LCA prognosis, adapted to chemical engineering processes. This method considers the relevant development factors affecting significantly the LCA results of the considered process. For this purpose those relevant factors will be identified based on the principals of LCA and process development. The experiences and LCA analyses carried out at LBP enable the introduction of general assumption for chemical processes.