NCCR Catalysis - Life Cycle Assessment of Chemicals

The NCCR Catalysis project has the target of defossilizing the chemical industry and creating new chemical value chains by accelerating the discovery and time-to-market of catalytic processes that enable the flexible production of customizable products from abundant and renewable feedstocks (e.g., carbon dioxide and biomass).
Life cycle assessment (LCA) has become a key method for evaluating the environmental sustainability of chemical products and processes, including catalysts. However, so far the use of LCA in the chemical industry has mostly been restricted to single case studies of already existing products and processes, partly due to the large data demands needed for a comprehensive environmental assessment. Other limitations include a lack of large-scale application data and high uncertainties with regard to upscaling. Therefore, further development of LCA is needed to allow for an assessment of a broad range of chemicals and processes at an early design stage.

external page www.nccr-catalysis.ch

We have two sub-projects within the NCCR Catalysis project:

NCCR Catalysis sub-project 1: LCA of renewable feedstocks and chemicals

NCCR Catalysis sub-project 2: Development of a pre-LCA framework for assessing new chemicals