Life Cycle Assessment Method Development
The emphasis of our research lies on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology and its development, this concerns Life Cycle Inventories (LCI) as well as in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA).
With regard to life-cycle inventory analysis, we are involved in the Download ecoinvent project, which is the largest transparent data base of Life Cycle Inventories. We also develop industrial-sector specific inventory tools to estimate a large number of inventory data as a function of limited input information. Finally, in our recent research we provide regionalized inventory data, e.g. for agricultural products and power plants, with a global coverage.
Our group was among the first to develop operational regionalized Life Cycle Assessment approaches, such as LCIA methods for water consumption and land use. We also address impact categories that previously were neglected in LCA, such as indoor pollution, and revise others that can be improved. In developing these methods, we take care that they are applicable in LCA studies. A previous group member is the main developer of the open-source LCA Download Brightway software that enables regionalized life cycle inventory analysis and impact assessment. An upcoming topic in our research is the temporal differentiation of LCIA.
The production of goods and services varies considerably around the world. In order to assess the implications on life cycle impacts, production routes around the globe need to be precisely analyzed and investigated. Depending on the industry sector (e.g., metal mining and processing), different modeling approaches are required to determine site-specific life cycle inventories. Detailed life cycle inventory modeling is crucial to assess environmental impacts of production sites but also reduction potentials. Emissions can also vary, depending on the production technology, pollution control equipment, energy sources, and other factors. The impact of these emissions is a function of their amount, transformation, and dispersion, but also of the sink region's population density, soil type, background emissions, and numerous other characteristics of the natural and industrial ecosystem. In life cycle assessment, regionalization is the recognition that place is an integral component of inventory and impact assessment modelling.
Current Research Projects
- Assessing environmental impacts of the mining sector
- BAMBOO Biodiversity and trade: mitigating the impacts of non-food biomass
- Environmental assessment of Water Use
- Environmental assessment of Land-Use related Biodiversity loss
- Global power production: Regionalized Emissions and Impact Assessment
- Organic Agriculture: modelling nutrients and assessing land impact
- SUSTAIN Assess and Integrate Nature
- Sustainability assessment of metals, food, and energy supply chains
- SWISSCHAINS – Swiss Sustainable Supply Chain Lab
Finished Research Projects
- Global and Spatially Differentiated Methodology for the Assessment of Agricultural Water Use Impacts on Biodiversity
- Life Cycle Management of wood in Switzerland: methods, tools, and environmental decision support
- SULTAN Remediation and reprocessing of sulfidic mining waste sites
- Sustainable Production and Consumption of Foods
- Towards Sustainable Use of Natural Resources
Current Research Project
- BAMBOO Biodiversity and trade: mitigating the impacts of non-food biomass
- Environmental assessment of Water Use
- Environmental assessment of Land-Use related Biodiversity impacts
- Operationalising the Planetary Boundaries framework to inform decision making for countries, cities and businesses
- Our work within the external page Life Cycle Initiative for the third phase of the external page GLAM project (Global Life Cycle Impact Assessment Method)
- Organic Agriculture: modelling nutrients and assessing land impact
- Particulate matter health effects
- SUSTAIN Assess and Integrate Nature
- SWISSCHAINS – Swiss Sustainable Supply Chain Lab
Finished Research Projects
Soil/water
Biodiversity
- Compensating the biodiversity impacts of land use: Toward ecologically equal exchange in the North-South context
- Global and Spatially Differentiated Methodology for the Assessment of Agricultural Water Use Impacts on Biodiversity
- Impacts of land use on biodiversity: Development of spatially differentiated global assessment methodologies for life cycle assessment
LCA models contain data about material and energy requirements, as well as emissions to the natural world occurring throughout life cycle of a product. These so-called life cycle inventories are collected along global supply chains of numerous products, which contain significant sources of uncertainty and variability. When propagated through LCA models, they lead to broad numerical uncertainty distributions of the estimated environmental impacts instead of single-value estimates. Naturally, this uncertainty decreases interpretability of LCA results, which is why it should be carefully investigated. In our research, we address this issue by performing global sensitivity analyses of LCA models.
Current Research Projects