Page 21 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

1.5 Emerging trends in LCT 15
1.5 Emerging trends in LCT

Many authors in recent years have highlighted development prospects of LCT tools.
Recalling some of them here, rather than to be exhaustive, I want to stimulate once again
the discussion.
Several recent papers emphasize the directions in which LCT tools must evolve to meet
emerging market demands. To continue building a greater demand is fundamental to redirect
resources of companies and governments towards a life cycle strategy. The starting point
must remain understanding, identifying, and managing risks, opportunities, and trade-offs
associated with products, technologies, and services over their whole life cycle (Fava, 2016).
Unlike the more traditional site-specific approaches to environmental protection, sustainabil-
ity strategies have implications that extend across a product’s life cycle and require engaging
stakeholders who can influence the ability to manufacture and sell products around the
world. Next, research developments, both in scientific and business communities, will inves-
tigate the adaptation of collaborative supply chain solutions with sustainability issues,
through application of LCT in supplier management (O’Rourke, 2014). Sustainable public
procurement and sustainable buildings will likely create the most immediate demand for life
cycle approaches in the market, with a “domino” effect. Whether and how the financial sector
incorporates life cycle approaches into their sustainability rating schemes could be a further
demand that will push the diffusion of life cycle approaches.
The growing knowledge of environmental problems and cause-effect mechanisms at local
and global level determines emerging needs for the assessment of environmental impacts.
That translates into efforts to improve life cycle inventories, enriching available local and
global data and information, and integrating the life cycle impact assessment models to in-
clude more detailed and site-specific cause-effects relationships. At the same time, the users
of life cycle tools need to have available life cycle evaluations with intelligent results, which
include uncertainties and knowledge limitations ( Jolliet, 2006).
Climate change stresses terrestrial ecosystems, increasing seasons’ length, and altering
community composition; these stresses enhance productivity and water-use efficiency, but
also lead to increased mortality and disturbances from wildfires, insects, and extreme mete-
orological events. Next, changes of life cycle tools must consider the link of climate processes
with Earth system models, including vulnerability-adaptation descriptors such as atmo-
spheric and oceanic states, land use, habitat loss, water availability, wildfire risk, air quality,
crops, and fishery (Bonan and Doney, 2018). For future-oriented decisions, environmental as-
sessment life cycle methodologies must progressively include indirect impacts, related land
use, water consumption, air emissions, acidification, eutrophication, and so on. For this pur-
pose, the traditional LCA model must be combined with other disciplines, such as general
and partial equilibrium models from economic sciences (Hellweg and Mila ` i Canals, 2014).
Until now, the social and ethical dimensions of sustainability have not been given the same
attention within the business community, since the benefits are less tangible. However, exam-
ples of positive links exist between environmental improvements and health and safety im-
provements in the workplace. Now, a general trend shows companies’ and governmental
policies to be more sensible towards integrated management systems in order to take into
consideration also health and safety issues, as well as other social aspects (Zamagni, 2012).