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Item type:Publication, Reviewing environmental life cycle impacts of biobased polymers: current trends and methodological challenges(Springer, 2020-11-01)Purpose: The aim of this review is to evaluate previous life cycle assessment (LCA) studies of first- and second-generation bioplastics, to understand the state of the art and the main problems addressed during the development of new bioplastics. Furthermore, it provides an overview on land use change (LUC) impacts accounted for, methodologies chosen, and the results obtained. Methods: Studies related to the impact assessment of bioplastics and published between 2007 and 2018 were gathered. Five keyword strings were used to perform a wide search and select relevant LCA studies. The study aimed to analyze critical methodological aspects in LCA, in order to determine the most common choices made during biobased material analyses, as well as major limitations. Three filters were applied to select comparable studies, ending with a final number of 17 papers. Recommendations were obtained by comparing common practices performed by different authors with suggested best available practices mentioned in handbooks and guidelines. Interestingly, LUC metrics and impacts were, most of the time, neglected. Thus, a specific assessment and discussion was performed regarding the methods used to quantify LUC impacts, considering its importance during the production of biobased materials. Results and discussion: The study discussed the main environmental problems linked to the development of new biomaterials. LCA of agricultural products or systems, when compared with fossil-based counterparts, is expected to show higher environmental impacts in categories directly affected by fertilizer use, occupied and transformed land, among others. Thus, studies that included additional impact categories besides global warming (e.g., eutrophication or acidification) concluded that biobased materials present higher impacts, recommending improvements in farming practices to improve their overall environmental profile. Moreover, this review gathered methodologies used to account for LUC impacts and the results obtained. The main constraint of including LUC impacts was the lack of a standardized methodology, as well as large uncertainties in existing methodologies. Conclusions: Most studies concluded that improvements in farming practices might reduce the attributed environmental impacts with the reduction of the amount of land, fertilizer, pesticides, and water used. Studies computing LUC impacts agreed on the importance of including these impacts and concluded that greenhouse gas emissions of bioplastic production would increase, but in most cases would still be lower than the impact of their fossil-based counterparts. However, challenges remain when computing LUC impacts that need to be tackled when working with the available methodologies, including the collection of reliable inventory data (site-specific or regional data) and regionalized characterization factors. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Life cycle assessment of bagasse fiber reinforced biocomposites(Elsevier, 2020-06-10)This study aims to evaluate the life cycle environmental implications of producing fiber-reinforced biocomposite pellets, compared with sugarcane- and petroleum-based polyethylene (PE) pellets. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is used to evaluate the production of four types of pellets. LCA allows the evaluation of the benefits of improving the production of biobased materials by replacing part of the sugarcane bioPE with bagasse fibers. The functional unit selected was the production of 1 kg of plastic pellets. Primary data were collected from laboratory tests designed to obtain pulp fibers from bagasse and mix them with sugarcane bioPE. Two processes were studied to obtain fibers from bagasse: soda fractionation and hot water-soda fractionation. The results from the LCA show environmental improvements when reducing the amount of bioPE by replacing it with bagasse fibers in the categories of global warming, ozone formation, terrestrial acidification and fossil resource scarcity, when comparing to 100% sugarcane bioPE, and a reduction in global warming and fossil resource scarcity when compared to fossil-based PE. In contrast, results also indicate that there could be higher impacts in terms of ozone formation, freshwater eutrophication, and terrestrial acidification. Even though biocomposites result as a preferred option to bioPE, several challenges need to be overcome before a final recommendation is placed. The sensitivity analysis showed the importance of the energy source on the impacts of the processing of fibers. Thus, using clean energy to produce biobased materials may reduce the impacts related to the production stage. These results are intended to increase the attention of the revalorization of these residues and their application to generate more advanced materials. Further outlook should also consider a deeper evaluation of the impacts during the production of a plastic object and possible effects of the biobased materials during final disposal. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Recursos, producción y ambiente(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Instituto de la Naturaleza, Tierra y Energía (INTE-PUCP), 2022)The environment is in a difficult and complex situation where natural resources are decreasing to attend the needs of the population, because the resource replacement rate is lower than its consumption rate. The population is constantly growing, to date there are 7.8 billion inhabitants, and it is estimated at 8.5 billion inhabitants by 2030. They will require food, clothing, housing, services and others, that is, natural resources will be needed to be transformed and obtain goods and services. In this context, Peru is a megadiverse country and very rich in natural resources such as forest, hydro-biological, water, mining, hydrocarbon resources, soil, among others, which can become a pantry for the world. What is the situation of these resources today? It is necessary to include production systems to understand environmental problems, since to obtain goods and services, these systems consume resources and generate waste, effluents and / or emissions in their operations, impacting the environment. So, it is necessary to know how these systems have been developed. Were environmental criteria considered in decision making? To contribute to sustainability, avoiding or mitigating environmental impacts, it is necessary to make decisions using methodologies and tools with a more comprehensive approach such as, life cycle assessment, industrial ecology, circular economy, among others.