Research

Preparing the ground for an operational handling of long-term emissions in LCA

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Abstract

Currently, there is no meaningful methodology for the estimation of environmental impacts from long-term heavy metal emissions in a life cycle assessment (LCA) context, when an assessment of landfill and mining technologies is performed. In this paper, the aims are to investigate the main issues hindering the standardisation of a methodology to account for potential impacts from long-term metal emissions, and to describe the characteristics of a robust framework for an operational impact assessment methodology.In order to demonstrate the issues around potential impacts from long-term emissions in LCA and derive a scientific basis for developing an adequate LCA methodology to address these impacts, a two-part review on long-term metal emissions is performed that (a) identifies a suitable time-dependent life cycle inventory (LCI) while underlining the problems in existing emission prediction attempts and (b) describes the existing LCA approaches for accounting of toxic potential impacts from these emissions while explaining the reason that the identified proposals have not been adopted from the LCA community. These approaches are then compared upon the basis of a common LCI and their differences are highlighted.A suitable dynamic LCI is identified for landfill emissions, which calculates Ni, Zn, Cd and Pb emissions as a function of time, based on assumed developments of the leachate pH. The results of the application of the different impact assessment methods on that LCI differ by up to 8 orders of magnitude. Therefore, the decision-making process supported by an LCA becomes very confusing. None of the approaches consider future changes in the receiving environment and are accompanied with any uncertainty considerations.In order to move towards a robust environmental assessment of long-term emissions, it is necessary to (i) represent future potential impacts more accurately by estimating time-dependent characterisation factors (CFs) corresponding to changing environmental conditions, (ii) develop more robust estimations by addressing uncertainty and (iii) refer to actual potential impacts, by taking into account the current and future background concentrations.