The aim of this paper is to highlight the challenges that face the use of life cycle assessment (LCA) for the development of emerging technologies. LCA has great potential for driving the development of products and processes with improved environmental credentials when used at the early research stage, not only to compare novel processing with existing commercial alternatives, but to help identify environmental hotspots. Its use in this way does however provide methodological and practical difficulties, often exacerbated by the speed of analysis required to enable development decisions to be made. Awareness and understanding of the difficulties in such cases is vital for all involved with the development cycle. Method This paper employs three case studies across the diverse sectors of nanotechnology, lignocellulosic ethanol (biofuel), and novel food processes, demonstrating both the synergy of issues across different sectors and highlighting the challenges when applying LCA for early research. Whilst several researchers have previously highlighted some of the issues with use of LCA techniques at early-stage, most have focused on a specific product, process development, or sector. The use of the three case studies here is specifically designed to highlight conclusively that such issues are prevalent to use of LCA in early research irrespective of the technology being assessed. Results The four focus areas for the paper are; system boundaries, scaling issues, data availability and uncertainty. Whilst some of the issues identified will be familiar to all LCA practitioners as problems shared with standard LCAs, their importance and difficulty is compounded by factors distinct to novel processes as emerging technology is often associated with unknown future applications, unknown industrial scales, and wider data gaps that contribute to the level of LCA uncertainty. These issues, in addition with others that are distinct to novel applications, such as the challenges of comparing laboratory scale data with well established commercial processing, are exacerbated by the requirement for rapid analysis to enable development decisions to be made. Conclusions Based on the challenges and issues highlighted via illustration through the three case studies, it is clear that whilst transparency of information is paramount for standard LCAs, the sensitivities, complexities and uncertainties surrounding LCAs for early research are critical. Full reporting and understanding of these must be established prior to utilising such data as part of the development cycle.

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LCA has evolved from its origins in energy analysis in the 1960s and 70s into a wide ranging tool used to determine impacts of products or systems over several environmental and resource issues. The approach has become more prevalent in research, industry and policy. Its use continues to expand as it seeks to encompass impacts as diverse as resource accounting and social well being. Carbon policy for bioenergy has driven many of these changes.Enabling assessment of complex issues over a life cycle basis is beneficial, but the process is sometimes difficult. LCA's use in framing is increasingly complex and more uncertain, and in some cases, irreconcilable. The charged environment surrounding biofuels and bioenergy exacerbates all of these. Reaching its full potential to help guide difficult policy discussions and emerging research involves successfully managing LCA's transition from attributional to consequential and from retrospective to prospective.This paper examines LCA's on-going evolution and its use within bioenergy deployment. The management of methodological growth in the context of the unique challenges associated with bioenergy and biofuels is explored. Changes seen in bioenergy LCA will bleed into other LCA arenas, especially where it is important that a sustainable solution is chosen.

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Production of Portland cement (PC) binders contributes substantially to global CO 2 production and various bodies including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have identified geopolymers as alternative binders with the potential to reduce these emissions. The hypothesis of this research is to investigate whether this is a realistic proposition in the light of limited waste materials such as fly ash and ground granulated blast furnace slag commonly used as geopolymer precursors. The effect of use of natural clay minerals as alternative precursors on global warming potential (GWP) is investigated. Methods of designing mixes with the lowest possible GWP are presented and these are compared to the GWP of PC and currently available metakaolin based geopolymer binders. It is concluded that it is possible to reduce the GWP by approximately 40 %, but other impacts may increase. Highlights A life cycle inventory (LCI) for Metakaolin is presented  A new methodology for geopolymer mix design is described  A reduction in Global Warming Potential of approximately 40% is achievable  The lowest Global Warming Potential can relate to the strongest mixes