Life cycle assessment in chemical industry – a review

Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Andreia Santos, Ana Barbosa-Póvoa, Ana CarvalhoThis paper presents a review of research works where the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology has been applied to assess environmental impacts of chemical processes. To accomplish this goal, a total of 46 papers, published in English-speaking peer reviewed journals from 2015 to 2019, were reviewed. These papers have been analyzed in terms of the most important decisions taken in LCA studies. These decisions include the goal of the LCA study, the applied system boundary, the functional unit used, the type of process considered, the database and software utilized, the impact categories considered, the LCIA method chosen and the type of analyses conducted to interpret the results. Most of the reviewed papers (73.9%) are comparative LCA studies considering a cradle-to-gate system boundary and a functional unit related with the mass of an input or output of the system under study. Petrochemical production processes are the focus of the majority (58.7%) of the LCA studies. SimaPro and Ecoinvent are the most used LCA software and database, respectively. Environmental impacts were mostly assessed using ReCiPe and global warming is the most analyzed impact category. Most reviewed papers (82.6%) focus on identifying the hotspots of the studied system, while including sensitivity and scenario analyses. This review shows that, although sig...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - Category: Chemistry Source Type: research