Integration of future water scarcity and electricity supply into prospective LCA: Application to the assessment of water desalination for the steel industry

Abstract

The urgency of tackling global environmental issues calls for radical technological and behavioral changes. New prospective (or ex ante) methods are needed to assess the impacts of these changes. Prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) can contribute by detailed analysis of environmental consequences. A new stream of research has taken up the challenge to create prospective life cycle inventory (LCI) databases, building on projections of integrated assessment models to describe future changes in technology use and their underlying environmental performance. The present work extends on this by addressing the research question on how to project life cycle impact assessment methods for water scarcity consistent with prospective LCI modeling. Water scarcity characterization factors are projected from 2010–2050 using the AWARE method, based on SSP‐RCP scenario results of the integrated assessment model IMAGE. This work is coupled with prospective LCI databases, where electricity datasets are adapted based on the energy component of IMAGE for the same scenario. Based on this, an LCA case study of water desalination for the steel industry in Spain is presented. The resulting regional characterization factors show that some regions (i.e., the Iberian Peninsula) could experience an increase in water scarcity in the future. Results of the case study show how this can lead to trade‐offs between climate change and water scarcity impacts and how disregarding such trends could lead to biased assessments. The relevance and limitations are finally discussed, highlighting further research needs, such as the temporalization of the impacts.

Circularity and LCA - material pathways: cascade potential and cascade environmental impact of an in-use building product

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Are future recycling benefits misleading? Prospective life cycle assessment of lithium‐ion batteries

“…Subsequently, Sacchi et al (2022) introduced "premise," a streamlined methodology to produce databases for pLCA using several IAM scenarios that consider multi-sector transformations such as electricity, fuels, and cement. The use of IAMs in pLCA has been growing, with applications in the automotive sector (Cox et al, 2018(Cox et al, , 2020, energy systems (Astudillo et al, 2019;Vandepaer et al, 2020), metal supply systems (Harpprecht et al, 2021;van der Meide et al, 2022), and water supply (Baustert et al, 2022).…”

Relevance of attributional and consequential life cycle assessment for society and decision support

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“…ALCA modeling could also be presumably used to approximate the effect of a decision in a comparative way through two ALCAs, one for a scenario with a decision and one without. For example, this could be the improvement or alteration of a process as studied by Baustert et al (2022), i.e., the ALCA of the product with the conventional process and an ALCA with the altered process. One can then wonder whether this difference would be the same as the result of a CLCA.…”