Sustainability in products and process design

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool that allows assessing the potential environmental impacts of processes, products, or systems along its entire life cycle. LCA is a standardized methodology that follows the ISO 14040/14044 standards, which constitutes a power decision-support tool for engineers, scientists, governments and industry in the quest for sustainability. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of LCA. Throughout this chapter, the importance of LCA is motivated and explained by assessing an illustrative example that compares the environmental performance of two alternative water bottles, that is, plastic bottle versus aluminum bottle. The first part presents an introduction to the phases of LCA, which involves (1) defining the goal and scope of the study, (2) performing the inventory of all the material and energy inputs and outputs related to the studied system, (3) translating the inventories into potential environmental impacts and (4) drawing conclusions and recommendations. Then, LCA applications in different areas are briefly discussed, including the sustainable design of processes/products, strategic planning and public policy-making, among others. Finally, in the last section, this chapter includes a case study of the application of LCA in practice to assess the carbon footprint of biodiesel.