Natural biotic resources in LCA: Towards an impact assessment model for sustainable supply chain management

Sustainability Problematization and Modeling Opportunities

A sound theoretical ground is required for sustainability related concepts reconciliation and operationalization. The current study investigates the opportunities to conceive a homogenous sustainability model derived from theoretical ecology, using as a prototype the “organization” concept from the Chemical Organizations Theory (COT). A sustainability problematization and a literature examination try to capture and link some useful perspectives and sustainability connected concepts. Some of the most influential methods and tools are reviewed, in particular among those relating to the triple bottom line framework and to the ecological footprint family, together with concepts close to the core sustainability definition, like resilience and circularity. Theoretical ecology provides candidate goal functions based on self-organization gradients, such as fitness functions and thermodynamic orientors. The COT formalism provides a higher abstraction level and the algorithms for patterns identification in a reactions network. The sustainability problematization reveals the motifs of a possible model of “total ecosystem”, which subordinates the anthropic cultural (social–economic) system to the thermodynamic, chemical, biological, and cultural determinisms regulating biological and cultural species of an ecological network.

A Natural Capital Lens for a Sustainable Bioeconomy: Determining the Unrealised and Unrecognised Services from Nature

Human activity has led to degradation of the natural environment, with far-reaching impacts for society and the economy, sparking new conceptual framings for how people interact with, and depend upon, the environment. The bioeconomy and natural capital concepts both blend economics and natural sciences and propose new interdisciplinary, environmental sustainability framings. Despite this similarity, the two concepts are rarely applied together. This paper applies a natural capital lens to the bioeconomy at three different levels: environmental sustainability framings; experts’ principles for a sustainable bioeconomy; and a case study of EU policy. We first construct an integrated cascade model that combines the unrealised potential of bioresources alongside unrecognised environmental services that tend to be systematically undervalued or ignored. Subsequently, we present five cornerstones identified from the sustainable bioeconomy-related literature from a natural capital perspective and highlight avenues of complementarity. The paper concludes with a policy case study of the EU Bioeconomy Strategy through a natural capital lens. There is evidence that the EU strategy has become increasingly aligned with the natural capital concept, but there is scope for further integration. The natural capital concept and related toolbox is an asset for the future bioeconomy to ensure it meets its environmentally sound and ecologically conscious objectives.

Biodiversity Assessment of Value Chains: State of the Art and Emerging Challenges

The consumption of materials and products is one of the drivers of biodiversity loss, which in turn affects ecosystem functioning and has socio-economic consequences worldwide. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a reference methodology for appraising the environmental impacts of products along their value chains. Currently, a generally accepted life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) framework for assessing biodiversity impacts is lacking. The existing LCIA models present weaknesses in terms of the impact drivers considered, geographical coverage, as well as the indicators and metrics adopted. Sound ecological indicators and metrics need to be integrated in order to better assess the impacts of value chains on biodiversity on a global, regional, and local scale. This review analyses studies which, using a life cycle perspective, assess the impacts of products' and services' value chains on biodiversity. We identify and discuss promising synergies between the studies which look beyond the life cycle context, and apply other biodiversity metrics. Our results highlight that the existing metrics of biodiversity impact assessment in LCA are poor at capturing the complexities of biodiversity. There are operational models at the midpoint level that expand on the assessed dimensions of biodiversity (e.g., ecosystem structure), and the drivers of biodiversity loss (e.g., assessment of species exploitation), but efforts are required to fully include these models in the LCA framework. In the business domain, many initiatives are developing frameworks to assess impacts on biodiversity. Many approaches make use of LCIA methods and input-output databases. However, these are generally coupled with other biodiversity metrics. This shows that the current LCA framework is not yet sufficient to support decision-making based on different sets of biodiversity indicators. Ecosystem accounting may provide important ecological information for both the inventory and the impact assessment stages of LCA, helping to disentangle the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services. Looking beyond the LCA domain can lead us to new ways of advancing the coverage of biodiversity impacts, in a way that increases the relevance of LCA across a wider range of areas. Future work should assess the indicators provided in various policy contexts.

Bio-Based Production Systems: Why Environmental Assessment Needs to Include Supporting Systems

The transition to a bio-based economy is expected to deliver substantial environmental and economic benefits. However, bio-based production systems still come with significant environmental challenges, and there is a need for assessment methods that are adapted for the specific characteristics of these systems. In this review, we investigated how the environmental aspects of bio-based production systems differ from those of non-renewable systems, what requirements these differences impose when assessing their sustainability, and to what extent mainstream assessment methods fulfil these requirements. One unique characteristic of bio-based production is the need to maintain the regenerative capacity of the system. The necessary conditions for maintaining regenerative capacity are often provided through direct or indirect interactions between the production system and surrounding “supporting” systems. Thus, in the environmental assessment, impact categories affected in both the primary production system and the supporting systems need to be included, and impact models tailored to the specific context of the study should be used. Development in this direction requires efforts to broaden the system boundaries of conventional environmental assessments, to increase the level of spatial and temporal differentiation, and to improve our understanding of how local uniqueness and temporal dynamics affect the performance of the investigated system.

Biodiversity impacts due to food consumption in Europe

Food security and biodiversity conservation are closely interconnected challenges to be addressed to achieve a sustainable food system on a global scale. Due to the complex nature of food production and consumption system, quantifying the impacts of food supply chains on biodiversity is challenging. Life cycle assessment (LCA) allows for systematically addressing environmental impacts along supply chains, representing a reference methodology that can be applied for assessing food systems. In the present study, 32 representative food products of consumption in the European Union (EU) were selected and their environmental impacts calculated through a process-based LCA. The potential contribution of EU food consumption to the current biodiversity decline has been evaluated adopting both midpoint and endpoint indicators. A comparison of the impact drivers was performed. Meat products, the underpinning land use for agricultural purposes, and climate change represent the main hotspots of impacts on biodiversity. Notwithstanding several drivers of biodiversity loss can be accounted for with LCA, the evidence of the increasing biodiversity decline on both a European and a global scale indicates that the assessment system should be further expanded, especially for what concerns refining impact categories such as ecotoxicity, and including resource overexploitation, and impact due to invasive species. This study illustrates: how far the current LCA based impact assessment framework may help to address the drivers of biodiversity loss; which are the main uncertainties associated to results stemming from the application of different endpoint methods; which aspects need to be elaborated further to ensure a comprehensive assessment of biodiversity impacts due to food production and consumption.

Global warming potential and total material requirement in metal production: Identification of changes in environmental impact through metal substitution

In view of the increasing demand for metal use, it is of significant importance to evaluate the environmental impact of metal production. The global warming potential (GWP) in the process of metal production has often been focused upon as a major indicator for evaluating the burden on the environment. Moreover, the environmental impact and mineral exploitation arising from metal ore mining activities, which generate unavoidable mine wastes and have an impact on the ecological biodiversity, cannot be ignored. The major factors for determining the intensity of resource exploitation being the ore grades and strip ratio, the existing indicators for land use employed in the life cycle assessment (LCA) may not fully cover the criteria of the impact of metal mining on the environmental system. Therefore, this study employs the method of total material requirement (TMR) assessment, involving not only the direct and indirect material inputs but also the hidden flows, which are particularly associated with mine wastes. Firstly, the methodology of computing the TMR in the process of metal production is developed. Next, the relation between the GWP and TMR for 58 metals is assessed and finally, the environmental impact through metal substitutes is evaluated from the perspectives of the GWP and TMR. This analysis could identify some of the aspects overlooked in the previous environmental criteria that were concentrating on greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. The developed algorithm may be useful in identifying appropriate metal substitutes, considering the environmental impact.

Trade-Offs between Nutrient Circularity and Environmental Impacts in the Management of Organic Waste

Measuring the circularity of resources is essential to assessing the performance of a circular economy. This work aims at proposing an indicator that quantifies how effective a system is at extending the lifetime of its waste components after they have been discarded. The developed indicator was applied to study the circularity of nutrients within a system that handles the organic waste (OW) generated in the Spanish region of Cantabria. A superstructure was developed to determine the optimal configuration of the system. It is composed of alternative unit processes for (1) the management of OW and (2) the application of the recovered products as soil amendment to grow corn. A multiobjective mixed integer linear programming problem was formulated under two policy scenarios with different source separation rates. The problem was optimized according to six objective functions: the circularity indicators of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, which are maximized, and their associated environmental impacts to be minimized (global warming, marine eutrophication, and freshwater eutrophication). The model was fed with the life cycle assessment results obtained with the Environmental Assessment System for Environmental TECHnologies (EASETECH) version 2.3.6 and the nutrient flows in the agriculture subsystem, which were calculated with Denitrification-Decomposition (DNDC) version 9.5. It was concluded that improving nutrient circularity paradoxically leads to eutrophication impacts and that increasing the SSR of OW has a positive effect on the carbon footprint of the system.