A Call for Technology Developers To Apply Life Cycle and Market

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A Call for Technology Developers to Apply Life Cycle and Market Perspectives to Understanding the Potential Environmental Impacts of Chemical Technology Projects Shawn Hunter, and Richard K. Helling Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., Just Accepted Manuscript • DOI: 10.1021/ie504102h • Publication Date (Web): 26 Jan 2015 Downloaded from http://pubs.acs.org on February 18, 2015

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Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research

A Call for Technology Developers to Apply Life Cycle and Market Perspectives to Understanding the Potential Environmental Impacts of Chemical Technology Projects Shawn E. Hunter*, Richard K. Helling The Dow Chemical Company, 2020 Dow Center, Midland, Michigan, 48674, United States of America

ABSTRACT

Chemists and engineers play a vital role in finding solutions to global challenges through their work on product and process development projects. To understand the role of chemical technology development projects in addressing global challenges, it is important for project teams to know whether commercialization of their project will lead to sustainability benefits, and to have a quantified understanding where possible of how significant each project may be towards addressing society’s sustainability challenges. In this perspective, we suggest that a life cycle-based estimate of the market-level benefits and tradeoffs associated with a project can be a regular part of its assessment. We provide a simple method for technology developers to obtain

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a first-order estimate of the potential environmental impacts of their projects, as a quantity that can be included in routine project analysis without much additional work. We suggest that regularly incorporating this market-level estimate of project benefits and tradeoffs can help chemists and engineers to focus their efforts on those projects that most rapidly advance the transition to a sustainable planet and society.

1. INTRODUCTION The last few decades have seen a tremendous amount of attention given by chemists and engineers to topics that deal with sustainability. Principles and guidelines have been developed1,2,3,4,5, awards have been given to projects that have been developed in line with the principles6, conferences focused on sustainability topics have been organized7,8,9, books have been written10,11,12, and new journals have been launched13,14,15. This incredible effort has been motivated in part by the idea that chemists and engineers have the ability to help solve the environmental and sustainability problems that exist in the world. Focused work by the chemical professional community is one subset of the global effort that has been given towards advancing sustainability, with international conventions and treaties, corporate goals, and unprecedented collaboration similarly seeking to advance sustainability. Given the scale of the challenges and the magnitude of the solutions needed over the next several decades, continued focus in this area by chemists and engineers is essential. The next several decades are expected to see tremendous change in the way that society functions, influenced by challenges that include climate change and distributional inequity16 and by risks related to a poverty-population-consumption-environment nexus17. Projections by expert


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organizations estimate that our global society will add over 2 billion more people to the 7 billion people that share the earth today. This 9-10 billion population presents a much different challenge for society than the 3 billion in 1959 or 4 billion in 1974 who shared the planet in the post-WWII decades that saw unprecedented economic growth and human development. This continued growth in population, combined with continued advancement in well being, is estimated to require 50% more food, 45% more energy, and 30% more fresh water supply by 2030 than currently available18. These increases all must happen in a sustainability context that currently sees society using more than 1.5 Earths worth of resources19, exceeding planetary boundaries that define a “safe operating space” for humanity20, depleting natural capital at dangerous rates21, and emitting annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that must be reduced by 50% by 2050 and essentially eliminated by 2100 in order to avoid the most severe consequences related to global climate change22,23. Considering these trends, it is clear that today’s chemists and chemical engineers are applying their knowledge and expertise against an unprecedented backdrop of sustainability challenges and opportunities. With technology being a significant determinant of society’s global impact24, but also an important key to addressing these challenges, applied chemistry and chemical engineering are and will continue to be essential for developing a global society that can meet its needs while living within the means of a single planet. As a result, many of today’s chemical technology development projects are focused on some aspect of sustainability. Project motivation often includes benefits such as GHG emissions reduction, energy savings, reduced water consumption, improved material efficiency, and other improvements in environmental dimensions of sustainability. For these types of projects, an important question arises: how does one know if an


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environmentally-driven project is actually helping to reduce society’s environmental burden– and to what extent? In this perspective we suggest that this important question can be addressed through the routine application of a life cycle-based market-level analysis of project environmental benefits and tradeoffs by technology developers. We first consider the concept of sustainability assessment for chemical technology projects, and then review different approaches that have been advanced to gain insight into process and product sustainability performance. We then tie the concept of sustainability context to chemical technology development, and present the idea of a life cyclebased market-level analysis. We propose that the regular application of this approach by chemists and engineers can help project teams to understand the significance of their projects in addressing the environmental dimension of sustainability, and ultimately to direct society’s limited resources to the solutions that have largest potential to help advance sustainability. 2. THE SUSTAINABILITY PERFORMANCE OF A CHEMICAL TECHNOLOGY PROJECT Sustainability is a complex topic that comprises several issues often described as “wicked” problems25 . The sustainability performance of a chemical technology project can be related to set of characteristics that span the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability. The primary criteria for evaluating projects and product concepts have historically been economic metrics, such as net present value and return on investment. These approaches are well-known to technology developers, although recent research is broadening the economic aspects to consider such things as ecosystem services as part of the economic analysis26,27.


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Process developers have faced many challenges in moving beyond project economics to characterize other aspects of sustainability. Although the importance of project economics has long been taught in university engineering programs, the broader concepts of sustainability are not fully integrated into most programs28. In this discussion, we recognize the complex nature of conducting a full sustainability assessment, which cannot be rigorously defined for all projects but can be defined instead in cooperation with the decision makers and societal stakeholders who will be impacted by the project. An ideal sustainability assessment would consider environmental and social dimensions in addition to the economic dimension that is a standard part of project assessment. As this paper focuses on technology developers, we recognize the practical limitations of data and time, which are often not available to project teams to carry out a detailed analysis of project sustainability performance across several dimensions. Hence, we focus our discussion on the environmental dimension of sustainability, which is a dimension that can usually be quantified by project teams with little additional effort and based on existing data and methods. Inclusion of the social dimension is also critical for advancing sustainability, but the current availability of data and methods for quick evaluation of social impacts on a project level is low, still under development, and not practical for use by project teams. We welcome the development of these methods for future assessments that can complement the approach to evaluate environmental sustainability performance suggested in this paper. 3. DOES A GIVEN PROJECT IMPROVE PERFORMANCE IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSION OF SUSTAINABILITY? 3.1 Principles. Early guidance for chemists and engineers to develop projects that lead to improved environmental performance was given by sets of principles, most notably the principles of green chemistry and green engineering. The seminal green chemistry principles


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developed by Anastas and Warner1 sparked an entire green chemistry movement. Green Engineering principles were later added by Anastas and Zimmerman2 and as result of the 2003 Sandestin conference3. In our own work, we sought to simplify these 33 principles into four simple themes – reduced hazard, atom economy, energy efficiency, and holistic design – that could be easily communicated to chemical process & product researchers and developers4. In addition to these principles focused specifically at chemists and engineers, other sustainability principles can help to inform and inspire chemical technology projects. The Natural Step has defined four “system conditions”5 that can define attributes of a sustainable society and which can be written as principles to guide actions that advance sustainability. Sector-specific principles exist for some products, such as the eight principles required for produces of palm oil to be certified as “sustainable palm oil” by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil29. Does implementation of these principles help to advance sustainability? These principles can be used to inspire projects and to frame the development of a project within a mindset aimed at sustainability improvement, but it has been recognized30 that adoption of some principles without quantification of the anticipated benefit can lead to an incomplete understanding of sustainability performance of the project. For example, if the use of a renewable feedstock to produce a chemical or fuel consumes more non-renewable energy across the life cycle than that required to produce the chemical or fuel from a thermodynamically-advantaged fossil feedstock, then utilization of the renewable feedstock may not help to solve climate change or energy issues31,32. Sustainability-driven principles can serve as a good starting point to consider when developing chemical technology to advance sustainability. But to gather an understanding of how that


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project actually performs from a sustainability perspective, quantification of anticipated benefits is required. 3.2 Sustainability Metrics and Indicators. Several metrics have been developed over the past two decades to help researchers understand the sustainability performance of chemical processes33, with many of these methodologies focusing on the gate-to-gate life cycle stage of the chemical process itself. Early work by Schwarz et al.34 focused on the use of process efficiency metrics to guide sustainability-oriented decision making. More recent work by The Pharmaceutical Roundtable of the American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute recommends the process mass intensity (PMI) as a single metric that can be used to drive more sustainable processes for pharmaceuticals35. The GREENSCOPE methodology from the US EPA provides the largest selection of sustainability indicators for chemical process development – about 140 – which can be calculated with information from process simulations and databases33. These indicators are again calculated on a gate-to-gate basis, normalized by limits of an ideal best case and worst case, and grouped under the broad categories of efficiency, energy, economics and environment. Patel et al.36 have developed a quantitative scoring tool for assessing chemical technology at the early stage of development. Their approach considered five dimensions of sustainability (focusing on economic and environmental performance), using quantitative or semi-quantitative estimates for 29 attributes of the new process compared to the incumbent technology. While their approach involves some metrics that consider environmental impacts that occur upstream of the chemical process, their analysis heavily emphasizes the gateto-gate chemical process stage. The gate-to-gate focus of these previous efforts was a logical scope for initial process sustainability metrics, since it is the life cycle stage within the greatest degree of control and


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influence of a chemical process designer or operator. One example of sustainability metrics that goes beyond the earlier gate-to-gate focus, looking more holistically at the full life cycle of the product produced by the chemical process, is given by Russell and Shiang37. Their work proposes a simple multi-dimensional approach to compare a new product or process to a benchmark across six life-cycle attributes (including environmental, social and economic factors) using qualitative and semi-quantitative answers to 23 questions, resulting in a visual footprint. An evaluation with this method takes a project team only an hour or two to perform, yet can provide valuable insights into the key sustainability issues and opportunities. Given the tendency for past methods to focus on a gate-to-gate scope of analysis, there is a need to emphasize the importance of looking beyond the process flow diagram when evaluating chemical process sustainability. While metrics such as process energy efficiency, atom economy, reaction mass efficiency, and process emissions provide relevant information to understanding process sustainability performance, these metrics focus on a narrow portion of the product life cycle, and therefore cannot fully address whether decisions made based on the metrics help reduce environmental impacts or advance sustainability. In order to answer that question, it is essential to understand the impact of the project over the full product life cycle. 3.3 Life Cycle Assessment. Assessing the environmental performance of a chemical technology project based on a single life cycle stage – such as the gate-to-gate chemical process stage – is an incomplete exercise. Technology options that give rise to an environmental advantage in one part of the life cycle may not actually be advantaged when considering the full life cycle38,39. Life cycle assessment40 (LCA) seeks to address this complexity. By examining the complete life cycle of the product, considering the function served (and value delivered to society) by the product, and examining the total resource consumption and environmental


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burdens that must take place in order to deliver that function to society, LCA can be used to identify whether an anticipated environmental benefit can actually be achieved by a chemical technology project. An important feature of LCA, which has been neglected in the life cycle-based assessment of many chemical technology projects, is the need to consider multiple dimensions of project sustainability performance40. A strength of LCA is therefore the identification of not only project benefits, but also project tradeoffs, so that a more-informed decision can be made with respect to project and technology selection. A study that only considers the GHG performance of a project may miss potential tradeoffs in other dimensions such as water or land use32,53 . This type of single-indicator study cannot be considered as an LCA under the ISO guidelines, which require that the selection of impact categories “shall reflect a comprehensive set of environmental issues related to the product system being studied”.40 Despite the practical time and resource constraints that may limit the amount of work that can be done to explore multiple impact categories, the project developer should always be aware of the existence and importance of many dimensions of sustainability in discussing the sustainability performance of the project. Applied to chemical process and products, LCA has shown that environmental performance can be impacted significantly by how products are used41, how they are disposed42,43,39 , operations upstream of the chemical facility44, and the options for feedstocks and raw materials45,46. The insight provided by LCA allows project teams and decision makers to better understand the impact of their decisions on solving sustainability challenges. By seeking to quantify the resource use and environmental burdens that occur throughout the life cycle – burdens that must happen in order for society to use a product – LCA can therefore


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provide an indication of whether a product or process can deliver reduced environmental burdens relative to another option, for the specific environmental categories included in the study. In LCA studies often done on individual chemical technology projects, the LCA is typically scoped at the product level, and comparisons are often made on the basis of an equivalent mass of material. For example, an LCA may inform a project team that their solution can meet the function of the product with 36% fewer fossil energy demand and with 54% fewer GHG emissions across the product life cycle.46 This type of insight helps a project team to understand whether their project can help reduce society’s environmental burdens. However, examination of potential benefits at the product level does not allow a project team to fully understand the magnitude of that benefit, to understand how important that project is relative to another project, or to understand how the project performance compares to limits or reductions that are needed to ensure a sustainable planet and society. For example, if one project reduces the life cycle GHG emissions to produce a kg of polyethylene by 5%, and another project reduces the life cycle GHG emissions associated with a given coating material by 25%, which project is better suited to help advance sustainability? If resources can be spent developing only one of these projects, which project should be selected? LCA results provided at a product or function unit level are not sufficient for answering these questions. If the goal of sustainability-driven projects is to help solve sustainability challenges, it follows that project teams should have an understanding of the extent to which their project can solve those challenges when broadly implemented. To fully understand the ability of a given project to advance sustainability, we suggest that project developers should consider the sustainability context of their projects, and examine their projects based on a market perspective


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of potential project benefits and tradeoffs. By filling this gap in the previous approaches, we believe that technology developers can be inspired to aim their work at the greatest opportunities. 4. THE SUSTAINABILITY CONTEXT A recent concept that intersects the idea of a life-cycle market-based approach to project sustainability evaluation is the concept of sustainability context. Sustainability context refers to the discussion of economic, environmental, and social performance in light of limitations and thresholds that can be used to define a sustainable society. Recent work in the sustainability field has acknowledged and criticized a general lack of sustainability context in much of the work being done to advance sustainability47,48. In the sustainability context approach, sustainability performance is compared to a specified level of performance that is defined to ensure stakeholder well-being47. These limits span global, regional, and local levels, and include concepts such as the level global GHG emissions that can be emitted while staying within a given (ex: 2°C) level of global temperature increase49, or the amount of water that can be extracted from a local reservoir for industrial purposes while assuring sufficient water access for all others who depend upon the water supply. This concept has been advanced for organizations by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which requires the consideration of sustainability context in organizational sustainability measurement and reporting50. Although the GRI guidance is developed for corporations to report on sustainability performance at the organizational level, the same thinking applies to the development of chemical technology project that seek to advance sustainability. In discussing project sustainability performance, knowing whether a project leads to lower environmental impact is less meaningful than knowing how that reduction compares with the reductions that are needed


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to ensure a safe operating space20 for humanity. Full evaluation of the sustainability context in chemical technology projects would inform technology developers on whether their project has met defined requirements for ensuring stakeholder well being. Hence, sustainability context could be used to define whether a project driven by sustainability concerns is actually serving to “create sustainability”, or only serving to “reduce unsustainability”51. In practice, the idea of sustainability context is fairly recent, and the generation of norms or standards that can be used to define acceptable sustainability performance is at a very early stage, even at the organizational level. Defining acceptable sustainability performance for a single project is an important and challenging goal that will require both science to guide acceptable boundaries and consensus to guide how those boundaries should be spread across economies, sectors, and products. Initial ideas proposed by Randers49 suggest that a concept of environmental performance per unit of economic value added could be a useful way to assess acceptable sustainability performance. Evaluation of sustainability performance at the project level in the context of limits and thresholds is likely to be a resource-intensive exercise, even after acceptable boundaries are established. Yet the concept remains important for project teams to consider, towards raising sustainability awareness and helping deploy resources against those projects that can best address sustainability challenges. A simple concept that begins to address sustainability context and can be readily evaluated by project teams is to understand the scale of potential environmental impact (benefits and tradeoffs) offered by a project. This concept addresses the question: if the project is successfully commercialized, what is the magnitude of environmental benefit that can be expected? Estimation of these market-level impacts can then be compared across projects, to understand which projects have the largest potential to reduce humanity’s environmental burden


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and to help drive towards global sustainability performance that rests within acceptable contextbased limits. 5. ESTIMATED MARKET LEVEL BENEFITS As an initial approach towards providing a sustainability context to project sustainability assessments, and towards linking the smaller-scale impacts of a project with the larger-scale challenges that face society, we suggest a market-level analysis of the potential life cycle impact associated with a project. This simple concept seeks to address what the potential benefit to society would be upon implementation and commercialization of the project. Considering the specific sustainability challenge of climate change, the market-level question can be stated as “if this project is successful in the market, what are the total GHG savings that would occur?” Estimation of potential market-level benefits can help understand the significance of the project in addressing sustainability challenges, can help to identify the projects that have the greatest potential to help society solve these challenges, and can begin to address project benefits in light of the sustainability context that is needed to enable the development of a sustainable society. An example of the concept can be illustrated using a hypothetical case. For analysis of project performance in a single environmental dimension, a first-order market-level impact can be estimated according to a simple multiplication of the product-level impact across a market volume as shown in equation 1: market-level impact = product-level impact × market volume

(1)

For example, if a process efficiency improvement enables a reduction in the cradle-to-gate GHG emissions of a given polymer by 0.05 kg CO2-eq/kg polymer, and the annual global market


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for that polymer produced using that process is 1Mt/yr, then the potential market-level benefit is estimated to be 50 kt CO2-eq/yr. The market volume used in the calculation can fall into two main categories: 1. the market volume expected to be achieved by the project, and 2. the global market for the product or process under development. Examining the anticipated market volume represents the impact that could be expected based on success of the project itself, whereas examining the global market volume provides a maximum potential impact if the entire market adopted the new technology, which may be a far-fetched scenario in many cases. We suggest that the most realistic impact estimate for the project is based on the level of market penetration understood by the project team to be realistically achievable and included in financial analyses. This level of projected market penetration can of course vary by project, as different projects will be forecast to penetrate their respective markets at different levels based on the dynamics of each market. Examining the global market, while unrealistic for some projects, can provide an upper limit for the potential benefit of a technology, and can prompt insightful discussions as to practical limitations that surround technology adoption and market penetration. To explore this market-level approach, we present a few examples where this method has been applied to chemical technologies and projects. Two of the three examples discussed here provide data in only a single environmental impact category (GHG emissions), which emphasizes the lack of multidimensional analysis present in many studies. In the 3rd example, we’ve applied the market-level approach to previous LCA work that did consider multiple environmental impact categories.


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5.1 Life cycle quantification of carbon abatement solutions enabled by the chemical industry. Previous work that has applied a similar market-level approach of benefits delivered by chemical industry products was published by the ICCA in 200952. This work sought to estimate the absolute GHG reductions that were achieved globally by application of several products produced by the chemical industry. To estimate the GHG savings, the global market of each application was examined, and total GHG savings were estimated for each application based on LCA study results and the amount of material utilized by society in 2005. Figure 1 summarizes the top ten product applications analyzed in the study that delivered GHG savings. As an illustration of the market-level approach, we note that the insulation savings was estimated based on the global annual consumption of expanded polystyrene, extruded polystyrene, and polyurethane in insulation applications. Market-level data – sales of 1,121 kt in Asia, 850 kt in Europe, and 882 kt in North America – was required to complete the estimate. LCA work estimated the GHG savings benefit across the globe considering GHG emissions across the product life cycle and estimated regional GHG savings delivered by the insulation during the use phase. In total, this study estimated that the life-cycle benefits of the chemical industry were equivalent to 8% - 11% of the 46 Gt CO2-eq emitted by human activities in 2005. While this study focused on the global market for a technology, rather than an individual project, it nevertheless provides an illustrative example of the pairing of life cycle-based information with market information to estimate market-level benefits related to chemical technology.


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Insulation

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2400

Lighting

700

Plastic Packaging

220

Marine Antifouling

190

Synthetic Textiles

130

Automotive Lightweighting

120

Low Temperature Detergents

80

Plastic Piping

70

Engine Efficiency

70

Wind Power

60 0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

global GHG savings (million metric tonnes CO2-eq/yr)

Figure 1. Global market-level GHG savings of chemical industry product applications52

5.2 Green Chemistry Presidential Challenge Award Winners. Recent Presidential Green Chemistry Award-winning projects provide an opportunity to explore this market-based concept at the individual project level. Some of these projects have estimated the GHG savings that have occurred or could occur as a result of commercializing the project6. These estimates are summarized in Figure 2 for five award-winning projects.


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CO2-based polymers

180

market penetration assumed

LCA-based GHG estimate?

100%

yes

MAX HT® inhibitor

0.002

25%

no

biobased succinic acid

0.008

single plant

no

25%

no

25%

yes

CO2-based higher alcohols

500

biobased toners

0.36 0

200

400

600

market level GHG savings (million metric tonnes CO2-eq/yr)

Figure 2. Reported GHG savings for Presidential Green Chemistry Award winning projects6.

The figure shows GHG savings estimates that span several orders of magnitude, suggesting that some projects may have a greater potential to address climate change than others. These estimates are influenced by the assumed market penetration, which varies across the estimates as indicated in the figure. For the CO2-based polymers project, full market penetration was assumed. For three of the other projects, 25% market penetration was assumed, based on actual market adoption in some cases. The estimate for biobased succinic acid project, on the other hand, was made on the basis of a single 20 kt/yr plant. The estimates shown in Figure 2 are also influenced by the scope of the analysis used to create the estimate. As discussed earlier, a life cycle perspective is required to fully understand the potential GHG savings related to a project, and the project estimated savings should be based on LCA calculations. For example, if the CO2-based alcohols project estimate did not account


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for the GHGs emitted when consuming the energy necessary to convert the CO2 into the alcohols, then the estimated project GHG benefit would be lower than reported in Figure 2. Of the five projects summarized in this illustrative example, only the CO2-based polymer project and the biobased toners project had estimates that were clearly based on LCA. This lack of consistency in the scope of the estimated benefits highlights the need to drive a life-cycle approach into routine project analysis by project developers. Of these two projects with LCA results reported, the CO2-based polymer project appears to have a greater potential impact on addressing climate change than the biobased toners project. However, to establish greater confidence in this conclusion, the practicality of the assumed market penetration would need to be assessed further for each project. We note that the two order-of-magnitude difference between these projects does not suggest that the biobased toners project should not be pursued or is not a valuable project. The difference only suggests that the GHG benefit is not as large as the benefit that might be realized from the CO2-based polymer project. For the case when the biobased toners project is the only project within the control of the decision maker, implementing this project does help to advance sustainability, relative to the conventional toners present on the market. We further note that the lack of consistency in the scope of the estimated benefits shown in Figure 2 – the fact that only some of the projects appear to have considered the full product life cycle in the estimate – highlights the need to drive a life-cycle approach into routine project analysis by project developers. 5.3 Biobased PE and PET. Polymers that can be produced from both fossil-based and bioor partially-bio-based resources provide an opportunity to calculate market-level environmental


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impact estimates based on “cradle-to-gate” LCA results only, as the two materials can be assumed to be functionally equivalent (meeting the same product specifications). In this section we calculate life cycle-based market-level environmental impacts for bio-based polyethylene (PE) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) relative to the fossil-based analogues. Although some biobased materials can lead to increased GHG emissions across the life cycle32,53, these two technologies do offer estimated GHG reductions relative to the fossil-based analogue. We also calculated market level impacts for other metrics, since there are often environmental trade-offs associated with use of bio-based materials54. For PE, cradle-to-gate GHG emissions for the production of a bio-based PE from sugarcane are reported by Braskem to be -2.15 kg CO2-eq/kg PE, which covers HDPE and LLDPE production55. Cradle-to-gate GHG emissions for fossil-based PE, assumed for sake of comparison to be HDPE, are found in the PlasticsEurope eco-profiles and reported as 1.8 kg CO2-eq/kg HDPE56. According to these values, each kg of fossil-based HDPE that is replaced by bio-based HDPE provides a GHG benefit of nearly 4 kg CO2-eq, which is a significant amount of GHG savings from a life cycle perspective. For a project to build a single commercial-scale plant of 200 kt/yr57 capacity, the annual GHG savings is estimated based on these values to be 0.8 Mt CO2-eq/yr. Scaling this benefit to an arbitrary 25% of the 30 Mt HDPE market in 200758 leads to a GHG savings benefit of 30 Mt CO2-eq/yr, whereas full market adoption would lead to an estimated benefit of 119 Mt -CO2-eq/yr, similar to the automotive light-weighting GHG savings benefit of the global chemical industry estimated by ICCA52, or about 0.3% of total 2005 GHG emissions. The GHG benefit for sugar-cane based PE is realized at the expense of increased burdens for eutrophication potential (EP), water use and land use4. These are common trade-offs associated


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with the use of bio-based materials. Agriculture requires land, can require large amounts of water (for irrigation or processing), and also usually requires fertilizers, which can result in large eutrophication impact. With respect to EP (using the CML 2001 generic method), cane based PE is estimated to have 1.2 g PO4-eq/kg PE, or about 3 times the 0.4 g PO4-eq/kg PE for fossil-based material.56 The direct land use associated with sugar-cane PE is 4.7 m2yr/kg. The annual land required for a single 200 kt/yr plant would be about 94,000 hectares, or about 3.5 million hectares to supply 25% of the HDPE market. This is about 5% of the currently cultivated land in Brazil (taken as a point of reference – potential production could occur elsewhere) – which is a physically plausible amount, but large enough that consideration of indirect land use, consequential and social impacts could be important. For PET, Shen et al.59 report cradle-to-gate GHG emissions for fossil-based PET and from PET based on bio-based ethylene glycol. For amorphous grade PET, the fossil-based polymer and partially-bio-based PET are reported as having cradle-to-gate GHG emissions of 2.05 kg CO2-eq/kg PET and 1.03 kg CO2-eq/kg PET, respectively, assuming the bio-based ethylene glycol to be derived from sugarcane and ignoring any indirect land use change (ILUC). According to these values, replacement of fossil-based PET by partially-bio-based PET leads to a GHG benefit of roughly 1 kg CO2-eq/kg PET. Installation of a world-scale partially-bio-based PET plant of 175 kt/yr60 would lead to an estimate GHG benefit of 0.18 Mt CO2-eq/yr. Considering a market-level estimate of the potential impact of the partially-bio-based PET, replacement of the entire global market of PET used in bottle and beverage applications (12.5 Mt PET/yr in 200759) would lead to a GHG benefit of 12.5 Mt CO2-eq/yr, an order of magnitude smaller than the estimated benefit of the bio-based HDPE example. Replacement of the 46 Mt global PET market in 200759 would lead to 46 Mt CO2eqMt, roughly 40% of the benefit for


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replacing fossil-based HDPE by the cane-based HDPE. As noted earlier, these full-market analyses provide an upper limit to the benefits offered by each technology. A detailed consideration of the practical limitations related to market penetration and scale up would provide a more insightful look at the potential benefit that could be realized by each technology. We also note that this approach can be applied at the manufacturing plant level. Comparison of the estimated annual GHG savings of the PE, PET, and biosuccinic acid manufacturing plant shows a respective GHG benefit of 800,000 t CO2/yr, 175,000 t CO2/yr, and 8,000 t CO2/yr, based on the information presented in this paper. Although these differences are related to the scale of each manufacturing facility, these estimates do provide an indication of the relative impact of each facility to help address climate change, relative to producing the same quantity of material from completely fossil-based resources. 6. LIMITATIONS Despite the importance of considering projects in a global sustainability context, there are potential limitations to the information that can be gained by applying the simple approach suggested here in equation 1. A clear limitation is that full market adoption or even partial market adoption may not be possible due to scale limitations; for example, a significant increase in the world’s sugarcane production would need to take place in order to meet even 25% of the global market for HDPE. Examining the practical ability for the project to be scaled up can help to further understand the potential impact of a project towards addressing a sustainability challenge. Another limitation is that market dynamics and rebound effects can affect the ability of a project to deliver the estimated benefits at scale61. A rebound effect such as the use of lightweight materials to produce larger rather than more fuel efficient vehicles, can be significant


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and poorly characterized. Some of these limitations can be quantified by applying consequential life cycle assessment62, which is based on microeconomic theory and examines changes in pricing, supply, and demand that result from the introduction of new technology to the market. Practical limitations in estimating the potential market-level environmental impacts of a project may require many simplifications that make the resulting exercise a first-order calculation. In fact, more detailed sustainability analyses that consider the micro-, meso-, and macroeconomic scales have been discussed within the industrial ecology field63. However, developing an orderof-magnitude estimate for the potential environmental impact of a project can be a good next step toward integrating sustainability and life-cycle approaches within chemical technology research projects. 7. CONCLUSIONS In order to help society transition to a sustainable state, it is important for project teams to move beyond simple project economics and focus our efforts on projects that have the greatest potential impact on solving global sustainability challenges. Understanding the potential environmental impact of a project using a life cycle-based and market-level analysis can help chemists and engineers to understand the extent to which a chemical technology project can contribute to the solutions needed. Conducting this exercise regularly would begin to link individual projects to the larger scales at which our environmental challenges are defined, as a first step towards considering sustainability context in project assessment. Applying this approach could help technology developers to focus efforts on projects that have the greatest potential for solving these challenges. Utilization of this life cycle-based and market-level concept for assessing chemical technology projects can help our profession to work most


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effectively, along with public policy advances and consumption behavior changes, to help drive an ultimate transition to a sustainable global society. ACKNOWLEDGMENT We thank Prof. H. Scott Fogler for his lifelong dedication to excellence and leadership in teaching engineering and education, from which countless engineering students have benefitted, including S. E. H. We also thank Prof. Phil Savage for the invitation to contribute to this special issue of Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. Additionally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of our manuscript for their constructive comments. AUTHOR INFORMATION Corresponding Author *E-mail: [email protected] Author Contributions The manuscript was written through contributions of all authors. All authors have given approval to the final version of the manuscript. Notes The authors declare no competing financial interest REFERENCES

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Table of Contents Graphic


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A Call for Technology Developers To Apply Life Cycle and Market

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