Challenges and complexities in application of LCA approaches in the case of ICT for a sustainable future

In this work, three of many ICT-specific challenges of LCA are discussed. First, the inconsistency versus uncertainty is reviewed with regard to the meta-technological nature of ICT. As an example, the semiconductor technologies are used to highlight the complexities especially with respect to energy and water consumption. The need for specific representations and metric to separately assess products and technologies is discussed. It is highlighted that applying product-oriented approaches would result in abandoning or disfavoring of new technologies that could otherwise help toward a better world. Second, several believed-untouchable hot spots are highlighted to emphasize on their importance and footprint. The list includes, but not limited to, i) User Computer-Interfaces (UCIs), especially screens and displays, ii) Network-Computer Interlaces (NCIs), such as electronic and optical ports, and iii) electricity power interfaces. In addition, considering cross-regional social and economic impacts, and also taking into account the marketing nature of the need for many ICT's product and services in both forms of hardware and software, the complexity of End of Life (EoL) stage of ICT products, technologies, and services is explored. Finally, the impact of smart management and intelligence, and in general software, in ICT solutions and products is highlighted. In particular, it is observed that, even using the same technology, the significance of software could be highly variable depending on the level of intelligence and awareness deployed. With examples from an interconnected network of data centers managed using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technology and smart cooling systems, it is shown that the unadjusted assessments could be highly uncertain, and even inconsistent, in calculating the management component's significance on the ICT impacts.Comment: 10 pages. Preprint/Accepted of a paper submitted to the ICT4S Conferenc

Assessing Temporary Carbon Sequestration and Storage Projects through Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry: Comparison of Dynamic Life Cycle Assessment with Ton-Year Approaches

In order to properly assess the climate impact of temporary carbon sequestration and storage projects through land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), it is important to consider their temporal aspect. Dynamic life cycle assessment (dynamic LCA) was developed to account for time while assessing the potential impact of life cycle greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. In this paper, the dynamic LCA approach is applied to a temporary carbon sequestration project through afforestation, and the results are compared with those of the two principal ton-year approaches: the Moura-Costa and the Lashof methods. The dynamic LCA covers different scenarios, which are distinguished by the assumptions regarding what happens at the end of the sequestration period. In order to ascertain the degree of compensation of an emission through a LULUCF project, the ratio of the cumulative impact of the project to the cumulative impact of a baseline GHG emission is calculated over time. This ratio tends to 100% when assuming that, after the end of the sequestration project period, the forest is maintained indefinitely. Conversely, the ratio tends to much lower values in scenarios where part of the carbon is released back to the atmosphere. The comparison of the dynamic LCA approach with the Moura-Costa and the Lashof methods shows that dynamic LCA is a more flexible approach as it allows the consideration of every life cycle stage of the project and it gives decision makers the opportunity to test the sensitivity of the results to the choice of different time horizons.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

Lifting the veil on the correction of double counting incidents in hybrid life cycle assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmentally extended input–output analyses (EEIOA) are two techniques commonly used to assess environmental impacts of an activity/product. Their strengths and weaknesses are complementary, and they are thus regularly combined to obtain hybrid LCAs. A number of approaches in hybrid LCA exist, which leads to different results. One of the differences is the method used to ensure that mixed LCA and EEIOA data do not overlap, which is referred to as correction for double counting. This aspect of hybrid LCA is often ignored in reports of hybrid assessments and no comprehensive study has been carried out on it. This article strives to list, compare, and analyze the different existing methods for the correction of double counting. We first harmonize the definitions of the existing correction methods and express them in a common notation, before introducing a streamlined variant. We then compare their respective assumptions and limitations. We discuss the loss of specific information regarding the studied activity/product and the loss of coherent financial representation caused by some of the correction methods. This analysis clarifies which techniques are most applicable to different tasks, from hybridizing individual LCA processes to integrating complete databases. We finally conclude by giving recommendations for future hybrid analyses

Substitution modelling in life cycle assessment of municipal solid waste management

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is gaining importance worldwide in guiding waste management policies. The capacity of co-products such as recycled materials and recovered energy to avoid primary production of equivalent products largely determines the environmental performance of waste treatment technologies. Estimating the reductions in resource use, emissions, and impacts enabled by this substitution of primary production is often the most influential and controversial factor in quantifying the overall environmental performance of a waste management strategy. This study aims to critically evaluate the modelling of substitution in LCAs of recovered material from municipal solid waste management systems (MSWMS) by answering two questions. First, to what extent is substitution modelling transparently documented in the literature? Second, are the substitution ratios justified to represent physically realistic replacement of one product by another? To address these questions, we performed a systematic analysis of 51 LCA studies on MSWMS published in the peer-reviewed literature. We found that 22% of the substitution ratios are only implicitly expressed. A significant proportion of substitution ratios is not justified (65%), while for the remaining 35%, justifications do not represent physically realistic substitutions. We call for more rigor and transparency, and we propose guidance for the documentation of substitution ratios, with the aim of reaching more credible and robust analyses. For the justification of a substitution ratio to be considered physically realistic, information should notably be provided concerning loss of quality, the function performed by substitutable materials, and the sector of use

Challenges and complexities in application of LCA approaches in the case of ICT for a sustainable future

ABSTRACT: In this work, three of many ICT-specific challenges of LCA are discussed. First, the inconsistency versus uncertainty is reviewed with regard to the meta-technological nature of ICT. As an example, the semiconductor technologies are used to high- light the complexities especially with respect to energy and water consumption. The need for specific representations and metric to separately assess products and technologies is discussed. It is highlighted that applying product-oriented approaches would result in abandoning or disfavoring of new technologies that could otherwise help toward a better world. Second, several believed- untouchable hot spots are highlighted to emphasize on their importance and footprint. The list includes, but not limited to, i) User Computer-Interfaces (UCIs), especially screens and displays, ii) Network-Computer Interlaces (NCIs), such as electronic and optical ports, and iii) electricity power interfaces. In addition, considering cross-regional social and economic impacts, and also taking into account the marketing nature of the need for many ICT’s product and services in both forms of hardware and soft- ware, the complexity of End of Life (EoL) stage of ICT products, technologies, and services is explored. Finally, the impact of smart management and intelligence, and in general software, in ICT solutions and products is highlighted. In particular, it is observed that, even using the same technology, the significance of software could be highly variable depending on the level of intelligence and awareness deployed. With examples from an interconnected network of data centers managed using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technology and smart cooling systems, it is shown that the unadjusted assessments could be highly uncertain, and even inconsistent, in calculating the management component’s significance on the ICT impacts

Consideration of marginal electricity in real-time minimization of distributed data centre emissions

Among the innovative approaches to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of data centres during their use phase, cloud computing systems relying on data centres located in different regions appear promising. Cloud computing technology enables real-time load migration to a data centre in the region where the GHG emissions per kWh are the lowest. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to minimize GHG emissions cloud computing relying on distributed data centres. Unlike previous optimization approaches, our method considers the marginal GHG emissions caused by load migrations inside the electric grid instead of only considering the average emissions of the electric grid's prior load migrations. Results show that load migrations make it possible to minimize marginal GHG emissions of the cloud computing service. Comparison with the usual approach using average emission factors reveals its inability to truly minimize GHG emissions of distributed data centres. There is also a potential conflict between current GHG emissions accounting methods and marginal GHG emissions minimization. This conflict may prevent the minimization of GHG emissions in multi-regional systems such as cloud computing systems and other smart systems such as smart buildings and smart-grids. While techniques to model marginal electricity mixes need to be improved, it has become critical to reconcile the use of marginal and average emissions factors in minimization of and accounting for GHG emissions

Consequences of future data center deployment in Canada on electricity generation and environmental impacts: a 2015-2030 prospective study

The environmental impacts of data centers that provide information and communication technologies (ICTs) services are strongly related to electricity generation. With the increasing use of ICT, many data centers are expected to be built, causing more absolute impacts on the environment. Given that electricity distribution networks are very complex and dynamic systems, an environmental evaluation of future data centers is uncertain. This study proposes a new approach to investigate the consequences of future data center deployment in Canada and optimize this deployment based on the Energy 2020 technoeconomic model in combination with life cycle assessment methodology. The method determines specific electricity sources that will power the future Canadian data centers and computes related environmental impacts based on several indicators. In case-study scenarios, the largest deployment of data centers leads to the smallest impact per megawatt of data centers for all of the environmental indicators. It is found that an increase in power demand by data centers would lead to a reduction in electricity exports to the United States, driving the United States to generate more electricity to meet its energy demand. Given that electricity generation in the United States is more polluting than in Canada, the deployment of data centers in Canada is indirectly linked to an increase in overall environmental impacts. However, though an optimal solution should be found to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions, it is not clear whether the environmental burden related to U.S. electricity generation should be attributed to the Canadian data centers

Correcting remaining truncations in hybrid life cycle assessment database compilation

Hybrid life cycle assessment (HLCA) strives to combine process‐based life cycle assessment (PLCA) and environmentally extended input–output (EEIO) analysis to bridge gaps of both methodologies. The recent development of HLCA databases constitutes a major step forward in achieving complete system coverage. Nevertheless, current applications of HLCA still suffer from issues related to incompleteness of the inventory and data gaps: (1) hybridization without endogenizing the capital inputs of the EEIO database leads to underestimations, (2) the unreliability of price data hinders the application of streamlined HLCA for processes in some sectors, and (3) the sparse coverage of pollutants in multiregional EEIO databases limits the application of HLCA to a handful of impact categories. This paper aims at offering a methodology for tackling these issues in a streamlined manner and visualizing their effects on impact scores across an entire PLCA database and multiple impact categories. Data reconciliation algorithms are demonstrated on the PLCA database ecoinvent3.5 and the multiregional EEIO database EXIOBASE3. Instead of performing hybridization solely with annual product requirements, this hybridization approach incorporates endogenized capital requirements, demonstrates a novel hybridization methodology to bypass issues of price unavailability, estimates new pollutants to EXIOBASE3 environmental extensions, and thus yields improved inventories characterized in terms of 13 impact categories from the IMPACT World+ methodology. The effect of hybridization on the impact score of each process of ecoinvent3.5 varied from a few percentages to three‐fold increases, depending on the impact category and the process studied, displaying in which cases hybridization should be prioritized. This article met the requirements for a Gold—Gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges