Mineral resources in life cycle impact assessment—part I: a critical review of existing methods

Abstract

Purpose The safeguard subject of the Area of Protection "natural Resources," particularly regarding mineral resources, has long been debated. Consequently, a variety of life cycle impact assessment methods based on different concepts are available. The Life Cycle Initiative, hosted by the UN Environment, established an expert task force on "Mineral Resources" to review existing methods (this article) and provide guidance for application-dependent use of the methods and recommendations for further methodological development (Berger et al. in Int J Life Cycle Assess, 2020). Methods Starting in 2017, the task force developed a white paper, which served as its main input to a SETAC Pellston Workshop® in June 2018, in which a sub-group of the task force members developed recommendations for assessing impacts of mineral resource use in LCA. This article, based mainly on the white paper and pre-workshop discussions, presents a thorough review of 27 different life cycle impact assessment methods for mineral resource use in the "natural resources" area of protection. The methods are categorized according to their basic impact mechanisms, described and compared, and assessed against a comprehensive set of criteria.

Mineral resources in life cycle impact assessment: part II – recommendations on application-dependent use of existing methods and on future method development needs

“…As a first step, the task force described, discussed, and assessed 27 existing impact assessment methods. Based on this comprehensive review, which is published in part I of this paper series (Sonderegger et al 2020), as well as earlier reviews and recommendations (e.g., EC-JRC 2011;Sonderegger et al 2017), the task force provided initial conclusions regarding the use of existing methods and areas for future method development. In parallel, the task force articulated a precisely defined and agreed upon safeguard subject for mineral resources within the AoP natural resources, which defines what actually should be protected with respect to mineral resources in LCA.…”

“…Previous reflections on the safeguard subject range from (1) the asset (natural resources as such independent of their specific function), (2) the provisioning capacity (the ability of natural resources to provide functions for humans), and (3) global functions (additionally considering non-provisioning functions for humans and functions beyond human needs) to (4) the supply chain (from the provisioning capacity to products and services) and 5human welfare (including perspectives 2-4) (Dewulf et al 2015). Such different perspectives of "the problem" with respect to mineral resource use are reflected in the diverse set of impact assessment methods, which model different cause-effect chains (Sonderegger et al 2020). To address this challenge, the task force used the outcome of a stakeholder survey and workshop conducted within the "Sustainable Management of Primary Raw Materials through a better approach in Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment" (SUPRIM) project (Schulze et al 2020).…”

A Review of Life Cycle Assessment Studies of Electric Vehicles with a Focus on Resource Use

“…Future LCA studies should properly choose a suitable impact assessment method based on the chosen problem statement (see guidance of Sonderegger et al (2020) [23] and Berger et al (2020) [22]) also bearing in mind that not all methods contain CFs for all assessed elements. Further, the importance of criticality assessment into LCA studies to achieve additional results and identify further hotspots is underlined.…”

“…As shown by Berger et al (2020) [22] and Sonderegger et al (2020) [23], for the assessment of resource use several methods exist addressing a variety of aspects including the depletion of resources, future efforts of mining resources, thermodynamic accounting, and supply risks. Depending on the research question, one or more methods could be chosen.…”

Analyzing Changes in Supply Risks for Abiotic Resources over Time with the ESSENZ Method—A Data Update and Critical Reflection

“…As potential supply risks are caused by economic, socio-economic, geopolitical, technical, and environmental factors, they are defined as short term aspects (3-10 year timeframe [18]) and the associated indicator values have to be updated regularly to adequately reflect potential supply risks. Due to the novelty of the existing methods, few of them have been updated so far (e.g., [19,20]).…”