Page 81 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

76 4. Life cycle sustainability assessment: An ongoing journey

stakeholder profiles are: egalitarian (social, environmental, economic), hierarchist (environ-
mental, economic, social) and individualist (economic, environmental, social).
The LCA results show that the total environmental impact (from lower to higher impact) of
the transportation fuels considering “well-to-tank” are in the order, ethanol-sugarcane < pet-
rol < ethanol-corn. The reason for the high environmental impact of biofuel from corn is at-
tributed to the large land requirement and the perceived consumption of fossil fuel in the
production chain in the United States. But when considering “tank-to-wheel,” the biofuels
had lower environmental impacts compared to fossil fuels. The petrol from Nigerian oil
and biofuel from Brazilian sugarcane showed more severe negative social impacts than petrol
from Russian oil and biofuel from US corn. The positive social impacts were in the order: fos-
sil fuels (lower positive impacts), biofuels from US corn (medium positive impacts), and
biofuels from Brazilian sugarcane (high positive impacts). The total LCC was highest
(0.0203 €/MJ) for ethanol from US corn but lowest (0.0111 €/MJ) for ethanol from Brazilian
sugarcane. The total LCC for the petrol fell in between the biofuels (0.0132 €/MJ for Nigeria
and 0.0126 €/MJ for Russia). The results were confirmed by the values of performance levels
of the different transportation fuels for the different sustainability dimensions, as presented
in Table 4.2.
The results of the relative sustainability ranking of the transportation fuels differed among
the different stakeholder profiles (Fig. 4.11). This implies that different stakeholders will have
different transportation fuel preferences. According to the authors, the dataset in the
Ecoinvent database used for their study are about two decades old (2000–18) casting doubt
on the current applicability of the sustainability performance results for the transportation
fuels assessed.

4.4.4 Reinforced concrete buildings in seismic regions
Gencturk et al. (2016) developed an LCSA framework and used it to assess the impact of
earthquake actions on lifetime structural performance of reinforced concrete buildings. The
case study was applied to a reinforced concrete building (four-story three-bay RC moment
resisting frame) located in San Francisco, California. The system boundary for the assessment
covered the structural components of the entire building and the functional unit was from cra-
dle to grave butexcluded operation, maintenance, and nonseismic repair not directlyrelatedto

TABLE 4.2 Performance levels for different transportation fuels (Ekener et al., 2018).
LCA SLCA
Negative impacts
Fuel Ecovalue EPS SHDB SDG Jobs created LCC
Petrol-Nigerian oil 0.693 0.558 0.152 0.113 0 0.652
Petrol-Russian oil 0.478 0.225 0 0 0 0.859
Ethanol-Brazilian sugarcane 1 1 0.728 0.699 1 1
Ethanol-US corn 0 0 1 1 0.333 0
EPS, Environmental Priority Strategies; SDG, Sustainable Development Goal; SHDB, Social Hotspot Database.