Introduction to LCA, interests and opportunities for the rubber supply chain

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a product-oriented method to assess the environmental impacts of a product while accounting for its whole life cycle, "from the cradle to the grave". It is standardised by international norms (ISO, 2006). It was first mostly used for eco-conception in industrial productions, but has been widely spread in the agricultural sector in the last twenty years. By its holistic nature, LCA is a unique method to assess several environmental impacts while avoiding pollution trade-offs between production stages or impact categories. The most renowned impact categories are climate change or energy use, but several other impact categories can also be assessed such as eutrophication or human toxicity. With the growing awareness of the risks associated with climate change and the need to protect the environment, the design of eco-friendly production modes has become critical. Throughout the world, initiatives from both the private and public sectors promote the development of sustainable supply chains including the development of communication tools using LCA indicators. In France, a law was recently promulgated (Grenelle 1, 2009) that makes the eco-labelling based on LCA compulsory for a wide range of products such as food and pet food, automobile, clothes, electronics etc. Application of LCA to agricultural products or bio-sourced materials is not straightforward due to the variability in agricultural production systems. This variability is particularly important in the Tropics, where both pedo-climatic and socio-cultural conditions greatly vary. To account for the influence of these conditions on the field emissions and the final impacts within LCA, methodological developments are being carried out by the scientific community. Researchers at CIRAD especially focus on how to better account for tropical specificities and perennial crops within LCA (Bessou et al., 2012). They work together with several partners in France (www.elsa-lca.org) and abroad, and CIRAD is notably member of the LCA AgriFood ASIA Network (http://lca-agrifood-asia.org). Undoubtedly, there is a good opportunity for the actors in the rubber supply chain to benefit from the researches at CIRAD and the dynamism of the LCA AgriFood ASIA Network. Environmental impacts of rubber products will necessarily need to be assessed in a short to medium term, for instance because of buyers requests, and LCA has become the most commonly used method in order to compare products. As a perennial crop, not used for food products, it is crucial to assess the assets and drawbacks of rubber production in order to define best management practices and supply chain strategies to limit environmental impacts. (Résumé d'auteur

Transportation Life Cycle Assessment Synthesis: Life Cycle Assessment Learning Module Series

The Life Cycle Assessment Learning Module Series is a set of narrated, self-advancing slideshows on various topics related to environmental life cycle assessment (LCA). This research project produced the first 27 of such modules, which are freely available for download on the CESTiCC website http://cem.uaf.edu/cesticc/publications/lca.aspx. Each module is roughly 15- 20 minutes in length and is intended for various uses such as course components, as the main lecture material in a dedicated LCA course, or for independent learning in support of research projects. The series is organized into four overall topical areas, each of which contain a group of overview modules and a group of detailed modules. The A and α groups cover the international standards that define LCA. The B and β groups focus on environmental impact categories. The G and γ groups identify software tools for LCA and provide some tutorials for their use. The T and τ groups introduce topics of interest in the field of transportation LCA. This includes overviews of how LCA is frequently applied in that sector, literature reviews, specific considerations, and software tutorials. Future modules in this category will feature methodological developments and case studies specific to the transportation sector

Sustainability in the product design: A review of recent development based on LCA

In order to achieve sustainable product design process, aspects such of environmental, economic and social should be balanced. This paper discussed on sustainability of product design, conceptual basis of life cycle assessment (LCA), review of LCA at several product design, methodology of proposed framework and discussion on strengths and limitations of LCA. This paper proposed to develop a framework for improving the product design process based on LCA tool. The aims is to calculate potential impact of environment, eco-nomic and social aspects during product design process. For environmental aspects, LCA tool will be used. For economic and social considerations, life cycle costing (LCC) and social life cycle assessment will be applied respectively. At the end, proposed framework are able to help designers to improve product design by considering all sustainability aspects

Life cycle assessment (LCA) applied to the process industry: a review

Purpose : Life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is a well-established analytical method to quantify environmental impacts, which has been mainly applied to products. However, recent literature would suggest that it has also the potential as an analysis and design tool for processes, and stresses that one of the biggest challenges of this decade in the field of process systems engineering (PSE) is the development of tools for environmental considerations. Method : This article attempts to give an overview of the integration of LCA methodology in the context of industrial ecology, and focuses on the use of this methodology for environmental considerations concerning process design and optimization. Results : The review identifies that LCA is often used as a multi-objective optimization of processes: practitioners use LCA to obtain the inventory and inject the results into the optimization model. It also shows that most of the LCA studies undertaken on process analysis consider the unit processes as black boxes and build the inventory analysis on fixed operating conditions. Conclusions : The article highlights the interest to better assimilate PSE tools with LCA methodology, in order to produce a more detailed analysis. This will allow optimizing the influence of process operating conditions on environmental impacts and including detailed environmental results into process industry

Dietary patterns of households in Scotland : Differences by level of deprivation and associations with dietary goals

Funding This work was supported by the Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS) Division.Peer reviewedPostprin

Life-cycle assessment of buildings: a Review

Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one of various management tools for evaluating environmental concerns. This paper reviews LCA from a buildings perspective. It highlights the need for its use within the building sector, and the importance of LCA as a decision making support tool. It discusses LCA methodologies and applications within the building sector, reviewing some of the life-cycle studies applied to buildings or building materials and component combinations within the last fifteen years in Europe and the United States. It highlights the problems of a lack of an internationally comparable and agreed data inventory and assessment methodology which hinder the application of LCA within the building industry. It identifies key areas for future research as (i) the whole process of construction, (ii) the relative weighting of different environmental impacts and (iii) applications in developing countries

Convergence Speed of a Dynamical System for Sparse Recovery

This paper studies the convergence rate of a continuous-time dynamical system for L1-minimization, known as the Locally Competitive Algorithm (LCA). Solving L1-minimization} problems efficiently and rapidly is of great interest to the signal processing community, as these programs have been shown to recover sparse solutions to underdetermined systems of linear equations and come with strong performance guarantees. The LCA under study differs from the typical L1 solver in that it operates in continuous time: instead of being specified by discrete iterations, it evolves according to a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The LCA is constructed from simple components, giving it the potential to be implemented as a large-scale analog circuit. The goal of this paper is to give guarantees on the convergence time of the LCA system. To do so, we analyze how the LCA evolves as it is recovering a sparse signal from underdetermined measurements. We show that under appropriate conditions on the measurement matrix and the problem parameters, the path the LCA follows can be described as a sequence of linear differential equations, each with a small number of active variables. This allows us to relate the convergence time of the system to the restricted isometry constant of the matrix. Interesting parallels to sparse-recovery digital solvers emerge from this study. Our analysis covers both the noisy and noiseless settings and is supported by simulation results

Layered cellular automata for pseudorandom number generation

The proposed Layered Cellular Automata (L-LCA), which comprises of a main CA with L additional layers of memory registers, has simple local interconnections and high operating speed. The time-varying L-LCA transformation at each clock can be reduced to a single transformation in the set formed by the transformation matrix of a maximum length Cellular Automata (CA), and the entire transformation sequence for a single period can be obtained. The analysis for the period characteristics of state sequences is simplified by analyzing representative transformation sequences determined by the phase difference between the initial states for each layer. The L-LCA model can be extended by adding more layers of memory or through the use of a larger main CA based on widely available maximum length CA. Several L-LCA (L=1,2,3,4) with 10- to 48-bit main CA are subjected to the DIEHARD test suite and better results are obtained over other CA designs reported in the literature. The experiments are repeated using the well-known nonlinear functions and in place of the linear function used in the L-LCA. Linear complexity is significantly increased when or is used

A Homomorphism Theorem for Bilinear Multipliers

In this paper we prove an abstract homomorphism theorem for bilinear multipliers in the setting of locally compact Abelian (LCA) groups. We also provide some applications. In particular, we obtain a bilinear abstract version of K. de Leeuw's theorem for bilinear multipliers of strong and weak type. We also obtain necessary conditions on bilinear multipliers on non-compact LCA groups, yielding boundedness for the corresponding operators on products of rearrangement invariant spaces. Our investigations extend some existing results in Euclidean spaces to the framework of general LCA groups, and yield new boundedness results for bilinear multipliers in quasi Banach spaces