Research

Benefits of using importance analysis: reflections from the LCA of a urban biorefinery using urban organic waste (RES URBIS)

Read the article

Abstract

Introduction In the context of bio-economy, innovative concepts for the integrated management of biowaste are being developed. An example is the concept of urban biorefinery system developed within the EU H2020 project RES URBIS, where biodegradable plastic is produced from urban organic waste. To assess the environmental performance of the proposed concept and address decision-making in the context of bioeconomy, a consequential LCA is planned in the project. Given the research nature of the project and the technology readiness level of the technology (i.e. TRL 6), few challenges are present: i) geographical representation as to address EU-wise decisions; ii) Upscaling of technology data to ensure comparability with existing full-scale options; iii) Definition of scope in the context of future scenarios, including technology data, market for plastic (substitution), energy mix. The objective of the presentation is to illustrate how a two-steps LCA based on the global sensitivity analysis (GSA) proves useful to improve the overall quality of the LCA study as well as to orient research activities needed for the development of the proposed concept. Material and Methods The screening LCA was performed as a global sensitivity analysis, according to the Bisinella et al. (2016). Uniformly distributed uncertainty was estimated for individual parameters and handled using variance-based techniques for the uncertainty propagation. Employed data were mostly retrieved from literature, as described in Boldrin and Andreasi Bassi (2017). Results and Conclusions The results provided a preliminary assessment of the overall performance of the system and a list of important parameters (Table 1.1). Based on these, a broad discussion was undertaken in the project to address further research and improved measurements and data collection.