Review of Life Cycle Assessment in Agro-Chemical Processes

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method used to evaluate the potential impacts on the environment of a product, process, or activity throughout its life cycle. Today’s LCA users are a mixture of individuals with skills in different disciplines who want to evaluate their products, processes, or activities in a life cycle context. This study attempts to present some of the LCA studies on agro-chemical processes, recent advances in LCA and their application on food products and non-food products. Due to the recent development of LCA methodologies and dissemination programs by international and local bodies, use of LCA is rapidly increasing in agricultural and industrial products. The literatures suggest that LCA coupled with other environmental approaches provides much more reliable and comprehensive information to environmentally conscious policy makers, producers, and consumers in selecting sustainable products and production processes. For this purpose, a field study of LCA of biodiesel from Jatropha curcas has been taken as an example in the study. In the past, LCA has been applied primarily to products but recent literature suggests that it has also the potential as an analysis and design tool for processes and services. In general, all primary industries use energy and water resources and emit pollutants gases. LCA is a method to report on and analyze these resource issues across the life cycle of agro-chemical processes. This review has the importance as a first part of a research project to develop a life cycle assessment methodology for agro-chemical industries. It presents the findings of a literature review that focuses on LCA of agriculture and chemical engineering literatur

Evaluation environnementale d'un procédé de production de bio-carburant

National audienceThe importance of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as an environmental decision support tool continues to increase rapidly in the recent years. The practice of life cycle assessment has been well documented as a tool for comparing products and processes or comparing various components within a life cycle. Goal definition and scoping as well as interpretation of the inventory results would benefit most from decision analytic approach and methods. Research on the environmental impacts of chemical engineering has gain a lot of popularity and importance but it still needs bundles of improvement and expansion for its implementation in the industrial sector. The present study presents the assessment of a bioprocess located in Africa and evaluates the resulted benefits from the coupling of LCA and CAPE (Computer Aided Process Engineering) concepts, methods and tools. While LCA method is mainly focus on products and raw data collection, our main purpose is to define a LCA (attributional) approach based on process system engineering. We conduct environmental assessment of biofuel production from Jatropha Curcas L. The substitution of conventional fuels (gasoline, diesel) by biofuels is considered to be a potential way to gain environmental sustainability agriculture. The assessment encompasses the cultivation of the crop, the oil extraction stage and finally, the biofuel production stage. For this purpose, norms ISO 14040 and 14044 were followed with the help of MS Excel using CML 2 Baseline methodology. Based on mid-point perspective we provide the first results from the interpretation phase. In the last part, this study demonstrates the sustainability of “2nd generation” biofuels and LCA as a sustainability tool. At the same time, it reveals that transesterification process unit is the most impacting. But we identify the limitations of using a “pure” LCA method. The potential benefits from CAPE domain are discussed and we suggest an improved life cycle approach taking benefit from process system engineering

Development in present case study of life cycle assessment for Jatropha biodiesel

National audienc