Understanding Prospective Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is crucial whether you're a product designer, an environmental manager, or simply someone interested in the sustainability of emerging technologies before they hit the market.
Prospective LCA is a forward-looking approach that evaluates the potential environmental impacts of new technologies or products early in their development phase modeled at a future time when they hit the market. It's a proactive way to steer innovations toward lower environmental burdens by identifying hotspots and improvement opportunities before the new technologies or products become commercial with large-scale production.
Implementing Prospective LCA involves a methodological framework that can handle uncertainty and future scenarios, unlike traditional LCA, which often looks at existing background and foreground data usually available in the databases.
Leveraging scenario modeling and integrating a range of potential futures, it allows for a robust and versatile analysis. As a result, we can incorporate this assessment into various sustainability and innovation strategies, ensuring that emerging technologies contribute positively to our environmental goals from the outset.
Key Takeaways
- Prospective LCA examines the potential environmental effects of new technologies.
- The approach uses future scenarios to evaluate and improve sustainability.
- It plays a significant role in guiding innovative and eco-friendly designs.
What is Prospective LCA?
Exploring how industries can innovate in a more sustainable and scalable way and continue to improve global carbon literacy, Prospective Life Cycle Assessment is crucial. It forecasts the potential environmental effects of new technologies, guiding us toward more sustainable solutions, including quantified circular models that offer a unique economic opportunity.
Prospective LCA is a forward-looking approach that estimates the environmental impacts of emerging technologies that are often still in the development phase. To define it in detail, a Prospective LCA is a method used to understand the environmental impact of a product or technology during its early development phase, such as during lab-scale production or at the prototype stage. At this stage, it's challenging to predict what full-scale production might look like, especially considering economies of scale where mass commercial production allows for optimization of resources. In today’s world of a circular economy, one can also use waste as an input in other processes, which is difficult to anticipate based on the inventory data of a prototype or lab-scale product.
Prospective LCA Example
The role of Prospective LCA is to model the technology in a future scenario where it is assumed that the technology is well-developed and at a scale comparable to similar technologies or processes it aims to replace or operate. The goal is to evaluate the environmental impacts of the emerging technology at full-scale production in the future, including all uncertainties and scenarios. Scenario analysis is crucial in this type of LCA. Based on the current scenario, one can use the status quo, assuming everything remains the same, and evaluate how the emerging technology will perform in terms of impacts. Alternatively, a predictive scenario can be considered where trends in changing the background scenario are taken into account, and impacts are evaluated based on the predictive timeline of the technology's maturity and the related technological changes during that timeline. For example, maybe at that time, energy will be sourced from renewables instead of fossil fuels. One can also account for extreme scenarios on both the positive and negative sides.
This approach provides a range of impacts and directions for improvement early in the development stage to avoid regrettable developments that could do more harm than save the environment. As Prospective LCA focuses on the future, data sources are typically not from available databases or previous LCA studies but from scientific articles dealing with the future, patents, and, most importantly, expert interviews and simulations for different scenarios to avoid temporal mismatches.
Differing from traditional retrospective assessments, it considers possible future scenarios to assess how novel technologies could shape environmental outcomes. It revolves around two key components: the foreground system, which encompasses the technology being assessed, and the background system, which includes the existing technologies that the new innovation interacts with. In Prospective LCA, the foreground and background systems are structured similarly to conventional LCA, with the difference that in Prospective LCA, the foreground system — featuring the emerging technologies — is modeled based on its production scale at its maturity in the future. The inventory associated with that level of maturity is taken into account. The background system is modeled based on what the background conditions might be in the future, in terms of, for example, energy production and other factors, to avoid a temporal mismatch between the foreground and background systems.
Comparison With Conventional LCA
Conventional LCA focuses on established technologies or products in present, while Prospective LCA is about technologies that are not yet fully developed so need to be modeled in future.
This demands a different approach for the inventory data collection for the foreground and background data, as it involves uncertainty around evolving systems and how it will mature in the future. Key to Prospective LCA is the technology readiness level (TRL), a metric that denotes the maturity of a technology, thus impacting the assessment's precision and the time frame for which the data will be collected.
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Importance in Emerging Technologies
Emerging technologies are the seeds for tomorrow's sustainable solutions. Prospective LCA plays a pivotal role in guiding research, development, and investment by revealing the environmental implications across all Scopes — including within hard-to-navigate Scope 3 — of technology at the earliest stages.
By factoring in sustainability early on, including considering ecodesign, industries can steer the development of innovations such as alternative energy or novel materials in environmentally friendly directions.
Applications of Prospective LCA in Sustainability and Innovation
When exploring the intersection of sustainability and innovation, Prospective Life Cycle Assessment becomes an increasingly powerful tool. It’s your key to assessing the long-term environmental impacts of the products as they hit the market in full-scale production, enabling you to make informed decisions.
Assessing Environmental Performance
Renewable energy and biomaterials increasingly contribute to a low-carbon future.
By conducting Prospective LCAs, you can measure the environmental performance of possible chosen energy and materials sources over the life cycle.
At Vaayu, this assessment includes:
- Emissions, factoring in scaling effects as technologies mature with time in the future
- Resource consumption, like energy use, that might shift with technological advances
- Converting emissions to impacts using PEF impact categories
For a full list of the impact categories Vaayu can cover in its Prospective LCA calculations, click here.
Case Studies and Comparative Assessments
On’s LightSpray™ Technology
The Prospective LCA Project
At Vaayu, we carry out Prospective LCA for partners across retail verticals.
One industry-defining example is with On, the athletic footwear company, to quantify the impact potential of its industry-first LightSpray™ manufacturing technology.
The technology streamlines athletic footwear manufacturing by creating a shoe upper in just three minutes using one sleek and simple approach. It involves using a robotic arm and one continuous thread to craft the shoe upper, cutting down on much of the standard manufacturing process used by On to create its athletic shoes.
Leveraging our internal specialist LCA team, Vaayu calculated a prospective attributional LCA for LightSpray™ technology applied to a specific shoe model, a conventional attributional LCA for the existing (non-LightSpray™) technology used in the same shoe model, and a comparative analysis between LightSpray™ and the existing approach, considering eight different scenarios.
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Comparing the Product Systems
Using Prospective LCA, Vaayu calculated that LightSpray™ technology has the potential to significantly reduce the climate impact of athletic footwear uppers by about 75% compared to traditional shoe upper creation.
We also found that LightSpray™ technology could reduce 4.6 kg CO₂e compared to conventional production and that the technology reduces up to 78% of production emissions if renewable energy is used, which On is dedicated to fully adopting as it scales its use of LightSpray™.
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The Results
Through this project, On is experimenting with a brand new way of looking at manufacturing in the footwear industry and will use the learnings to work towards making significant reductions in its environmental impact. We are grateful to be a part of On’s important journey and the scaling of LightSpray™ to reduce the footwear industry’s global impact.
Anticipatory Approaches in Technology Development
Prospective LCAs, sometimes called Anticipatory LCAs and ex-ante LCAs, are not a crystal ball, but they’re one surefire way to get a deeper understanding of actions versus outcomes.
We can use them to deep dive into the future impacts of nanomaterials or other nascent tech. This foresight is crucial in responsible research and innovation, ensuring that sustainability is baked into the development process from the get-go.
Remember, it's about predicting and guiding environmental sustainable development — not just reacting to it. When used at scale, this forward-thinking approach can contribute to limiting how many climate tipping points we reach and help decelerate climate change.
Prospective LCA Methodological Framework
Crafting a methodological framework for Prospective life cycle assessment is about setting the stage for meticulous and robust analysis. It's about making sure you’ve got a solid plan before diving into the details of assessing emerging technologies.
System Boundaries and Modeling
When kicking off a Prospective LCA, as in other types of LCA analysis, defining the system boundaries is a priority. This means determining what's in or out of your study.
Foreground systems are what you're directly investigating - for instance, you might be researching a new type of garment material made from recycled fabric. Although the technology for recycling this fabric may currently be at a lab scale and not yet in full production, you would still want to model it at full scale to determine the potential environmental impacts of the new fiber recycling technology.
At Vaayu, we are working with companies that are developing innovative ways to use improved manufacturing technology solutions . However, since the technology is only at a initial stage in these cases, one needs to collect foreground data based on research and expert interviews to understand its impacts as it would be implemented at full-scale production in the future.
On the other side, background systems describe the broader industrial and environmental processes your technology interacts with. In Prospective LCA, this also needs to be modeled in the future.
- Foreground Systems: directly involves your study's technology.
- Background Systems: includes the background conditions in which the system will interact in the future.
Handling Data Scarcity
Data scarcity is a common challenge for emerging products and services. LCA of new tech often means grappling with data scarcity challenges. The primary data you need might not exist yet.
This shouldn’t be considered a roadblock but rather an opportunity for creativity and innovation.
At Vaayu, we leverage AI and machine learning technology to:
- Use proxy data extrapolated to future scenarios to fill gaps in a smart and meaningful way.
- Do sensitivity analysis to understand how data variability affects your results in future scenarios.
Scenario Modelling and Future Projections
Future projections are essential for seeing beyond the present. For glimpses into potential future impacts, scenario modeling of future scenarios is invaluable.
It’s important to remember that there can be unprecedented shifts in things like energy markets or changes in regulations, all of which could affect your technology's impact.
In Vaayu’s Prospective LCA approach, partners can:
- Add, change and compare reasonable future scenarios.
- Benefit from detailed inventory modeling that can also incorporate futuristic changes in background data, helping you foresee the impacts.
Incorporating Uncertainty
Addressing the uncertainty analyses is crucial. Your results aren’t just numbers; they’re educated guesses of your product or process’s environmental footprint. Uncertainty and accuracy are where you quantify exactly how sure you are about your findings.
With Vaayu’s pioneering Accuracy Score per every calculation as standard, you can:
- Embrace uncertainty as part of your analysis.
- Use statistical methods to define the range of possible outcomes.
As we close our exploration of Prospective Life Cycle Assessment, we hope this forward-looking methodology is understood as not just a tool but a compass that can guide your team and company toward more sustainable technological innovations.
By focusing on the potential environmental impacts during the early development stages of products and technologies, Prospective LCA enables businesses to navigate complex sustainability challenges effectively.
This approach not only highlights areas for improvement but also ensures that new innovations align with our environmental goals from the start. It’s about making informed decisions that consider the long-term impacts on our planet.
For those seeking to integrate sustainability into their development processes, embracing Prospective LCA offers a pathway to achieving more environmentally friendly outcomes and setting new standards in lower-impact design. To delve deeper into how this could transform your business strategies, get in touch.
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