Topic B.7: Life cycle assessment of renewable resources from by-products and cascade utilization

The life cycle assessment tool is a proven method to present the potential environmental impact of products, services, and production processes. It especially assists with the development and improvements of products, service provisions and value chains, the support of investment decisions, and support of arguments in marketing (Guinée, 2002; ISO, 2006; Finnveden et al., 2009). There are, as yet, no examples of applications of comprehensive assessment of renewable resources from by-products and cascade utilization. The shortcomings in the methods are due to the application of historical averages. These averages are inadequate for a forecast assessment of innovations such as wood plastic composites and to support decisions.

Consequently, in this topic and in conjunction with topics B.5 and B.8, concepts are developed for the timely consideration of current production data and forecast data (see topic A.1) for future-oriented life cycle assessment. Here too, transport’s operating range (see topic B.1) could be used as the life cycle assessment models’ moderating variable. A specific challenge is the consideration of the time shifts as a result of the stochastic transitions between the different phases within the renewable resources’ utilization cascade. New evaluation approaches to assess business management actions are therefore developed on cascade utilization’s various levels, taking the time delays into account. Close co-operation with topic A.7 is necessary given the growing importance of generating energy from renewable resources. Our many preliminary studies in the area of life cycle assessment can also be used (Geldermann et al., 1999; French, Geldermann, 2005; Geldermann et al., 2007; Oberschmidt et al., 2010; Geldermann et al., 2010; Schmidt et al., 2010b). The outcome of the latter are implemented life cycle assessments (e.g., with the life cycle assessment software UMBERTO), as well as applied prototypes for the evaluation of various future development paths (see topic A.1).