Alexis Laurent

Technical University of Denmark | DTU · Department of Management Engineering - Division for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment

Sustainability and, especially, emission reductions are significant challenges for airports currently being addressed. The Clean Sky 2 project GENESIS addresses the environmental sustainability of hybrid-electric 50-passenger aircraft systems in a life cycle perspective to support the development of a technology roadmap for the transition to sustai...

Balancing human communities' and ecosystems' need for freshwater is one of the major challenges of the 21st century as population growth and improved living conditions put increasing pressure on freshwater resources. While frameworks to assess the environmental impacts of freshwater consumption have been proposed at the regional scale, an operation...

Several water footprint indicators have been developed to curb freshwater stress. Volumetric footprints support water allocation decisions and strive to increase water productivity in all sectors. In contrast, impact-oriented footprints are used to minimize the impacts of water use on human health, ecosystems, and freshwater resources. Efforts to c...

A significant fraction (45%) of global environmental losses of plastics stems from mismanaged landfills and open dumps located mainly in the Asian region. These lost plastics cause substantial impacts on the ecosystems, human health and economy. To date, no large-scale quantification has ever been made to estimate urban, national, or global risks o...

Life cycle inventory (LCI) data gathering is one of the most time-consuming and data-intensive tasks in life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. Until now, it has mainly been described at a theoretical level and is associated with non-specific guidelines in LCA reference documents, thus leaving LCA practitioners with limited guidance prone to inefficie...

Aircraft engine manufacturers have been reported to cause great environmental impacts within the aircraft manufacturing industry, with a large contribution stemming from the integrated bladed rotors due to special manufacturing requirements. Here we assess all relevant life cycle environmental impacts of manufacturing a Ti–6Al–4 V alloy rotor and i...

Several water footprint indicators have been developed to curb freshwater stress. Volumetric footprints support water allocation decisions and strive to increase water productivity in all sectors. In contrast, impact-oriented footprints focus on minimizing the impacts of water use on human health, ecosystems, and freshwater resources. Efforts to co...

Environmental dissipation is a novel approach to account for impacts from mineral resources. In contrast to all other resource‐related life cycle impact assessment methods, which use data on extractions as input to calculation of indicator scores, environmental dissipation is characterized solely through emissions to the environment. Making environ...

To address global food demand and sustainability challenges, aquaculture has appeared as an essential element in food systems, and an increasing number of national aquaculture policies have emerged over the past decades. However, several of these policies have failed because of an often-argued inability to anticipate their far-reaching implications...

As part of the Paris Agreement, countries are asked to put forward their nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which present their proposed pathways to tackle climate change. To that end, circular economy (CE) has been proposed as a potentially important catalyzer to meet NDCs. Yet, the potential of CE strategies to help reach climate goals a...

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-020-01844-3 Purpose Scientific Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) literature provides some examples of LCA teaching in higher education, but not a structured overview of LCA teaching contents and related competencies. Hence this paper aims at assessing and highlighting trends in LCA learning outcomes, teaching approaches an...

The aeronautics sector has been regarded as an important contributor to environmental problems, due to aircraft fuel consumption and combustion emissions. Little is known about the other parts of the value chain, in particular the aircraft manufacturing. The complexity of aircraft systems and the lack of public data have prevented analysis of disag...

In a context of global population growth and increased food demand, the development of the aquaculture industry has become essential, and aquaculture development policies have flourished. However, aquaculture is associated with various environmental impacts, such as eutrophication or climate change. It is therefore important to assess the environme...

To assess terrestrial ecosystems damages from acidification, life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) can be applied using characterisation factors, which integrate the quantification of adverse effects via effect factors (EFs), linking decreasing soil pH to declines in species richness. With a species coverage of 0.6%, the currently-existing EFs define...

In the light of increasing human pressures on the Earth system, the issue of sharing in the face of scarcity is more pressing than ever. The planetary boundary framework identifies and quantifies nine environmental boundaries and corresponding human pressures. However, when aiming to make the concept operational for decision support it is unclear h...

Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is a lively field of research, and data and models are continuously improved in terms of impact pathways covered, reliability, and spatial detail. However, many of these advancements are scattered throughout the scientific literature, making it difficult for practitioners to apply the new models. Here, we present...

The production and use of plastics have increased exponentially in the past decades, leading to a corresponding increment in plastics waste generation. Globally, a significant portion of the generated plastics waste ends up in landfills due to limited management schemes for plastics. These landfills have been recognized as a major source of plastic...

Life cycle interpretation is the fourth and last phase of life cycle assessment (LCA). Being a “pivot” phase linking all other phases and the conclusions and recommendations from an LCA study, it represents a challenging task for practitioners, who miss harmonized guidelines that are sufficiently complete, detailed, and practical to conduct its dif...

In the beginning of 2019, the Singaporean government announced its desire to increase domestic food production and, in particular, aquaculture to reach 30% of self-sufficiency by 2030. Similar policies aiming at encouraging aquaculture growth abound in high-income countries in recent years, but have had limited success. Hence, this paper investigat...

Using selected bio-based feedstocks as alternative to fossil resources for producing biochemicals and derived materials is increasingly considered an important goal of a viable bioeconomy worldwide. However, to ensure that using selected bio-based feedstocks is aligned with the global sustainability agenda, impacts along the entire life cycle of bi...

Technology has an important role to play in the development of a sustainable society, and technical research is fundamental to ensure the advancement of technologies that is required to achieve the needed progress in eco-efficiency and social performance of future technologies. Sustainability contributions should thus be an important consideration...

With the increasing focus on marine plastic pollution, quantification of the environmental losses of plastics in the world, with differentiation into geographic regions, polymers and loss occurrences along the plastics value chains, is required. In this study, we make a global estimation of the losses of plastics to the environment across the entir...

Recent economic developments have signalled that self-consumption of photovoltaics (PV)-generated electricity could be financially more attractive than exporting it to the grid in many countries. As an emerging PV technology, organic photovoltaics (OPV) have been recognized as potential bearer of economic and environmental gains. Yet, could OPV del...

As the EU energy system transitions to low carbon, the technology choices should consider a broader set of criteria. The use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) prevents burden shift across life cycle stages or impact categories , while the use of Energy System Models (ESM) allows evaluating alternative policies, capacity evolution and covering all the...

Environmentally-extended multi-region input-output (EE-MRIO) models allow calculating environmental impacts of goods and services in a supply-chain perspective. However, current EE-MRIO databases only have limited coverage of toxic pollutant emissions. This limited coverage is caused by the fact that public emission databases currently provide a ra...

Purpose This paper addresses the need for a globally regionalized method for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), integrating multiple state-of-the-art developments as well as damages on water and carbon areas of concern within a consistent LCIA framework. This method, named IMPACT World+, is the update of the IMPACT 2002+, LUCAS, and EDIP methods....

Purpose Land use can cause significant impacts on ecosystems and natural resources. To assess these impacts using life cycle assessment (LCA) and ensure adequate decision-making, comprehensive national inventories of land occupation and transformation flows are required. Here, we aim at developing globally differentiated inventories of land use flo...

The assessment of ecosystem services (ES) is covered in a fragmented manner by environmental decision support tools that provide information about the potential environmental impacts of supply chains and their products, such as the well-known life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. Within the flagship project of the Life Cycle Initiative (hosted b...

The reduction of chemical pollution is a priority in many regional, national, and international policies, including in EU countries. To effectively do so, quantified overviews of pollutant emissions at national levels and with some granularity in their sources, are required. However, current monitoring efforts are often scattered and a quantitative...

Purpose In Life Cycle Impact Assessment, atmospheric fate factors, soil exposure factors, and effect factors are combined to characterize potential impacts of acidifying substances in terrestrial environments. Due to the low availability of global data sets, effect factors (EFs) have been reported as the major contributors to statistical uncertaint...

Purpose Regionalized life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) has rapidly developed in the past decade, though its widespread application, robustness, and validity still face multiple challenges. Under the umbrella of UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative, a dedicated cross-cutting working group on regionalized LCIA aims to provide an overview of the status...

Life cycle engineering (LCE) targets product development and manufacturing activities in a life cycle perspective, with the aim to create more sustainable solutions. Coined approximately 30 years ago, it was adopted by the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP, from the French title), which established annual conferences on life cy...

Purpose In support of the sustainable development of our societies, future engineers should have elementary knowledge in sustainability assessment and use of life cycle assessment. Publications on pedagogical experience with teaching life cycle assessment (LCA) in high-level education are however scarce. Here, we describe and discuss 20 years of ex...

Soil pH has been used to indicate how changes in soil acidity can influence species loss. The correlation between soil pH and plant species richness has mainly been studied in North America and Europe, while there is a lack of studies exploring Tropical floras. Here, our aim was therefore to investigate the relationships between terrestrial plant s...

Purpose The aquaculture sector is the fastest growing food production industry. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) can be a useful tool to assess its environmental impacts and ensure environmentally sustainable development. Years ago, critical reviews of LCA methodology have been conducted in that field to evaluate methodological practice. However, how ef...

Impacts associated with land use are increasingly recognized as important aspects to consider when conducting Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Across the existing models accounting for land use activities in life cycle impact assessment, a balance is yet to be found between complexity and comprehensiveness on one hand, and applicability on the other ha...

Large companies now commonly release corporate sustainability (CS) reports in which they describe their approach to handle sustainability challenges. To guide environmental sustainability efforts in the industry, the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology has been recognized as an important tool by researchers and policy makers. But to what extent...

Metallic elements present in livestock manure as co-contaminants have the potential to cause terrestrial ecotoxic impacts when the manure is used as fertilizer on agricultural soils. The magnitude of this impact at country scale in Europe has, to date, not been quantified. Here, we address this knowledge gap by combining recently developed national...

The aquaculture sector is anticipated to be a keystone in food production systems in the coming decades. However, it is associated with potentially important environmental damages caused by its contribution to eutrophication or climate change, for example. To comprehensively quantify those impacts, life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have been cond...

We employed life cycle assessment to evaluate the use of hydrochars, prospective soil conditioners produced from biowaste using hydrothermal carbonization, as an approach to improving agriculture while reusing carbon present in the biowaste. We considered six different crops (barley, wheat, sugar beet, fava bean, onion and lucerne) and two differen...

The inventory analysis is the third and often most time-consuming part of an LCA. The analysis is guided by the goal and scope definition, and its core activity is the collection and compilation of data on elementary flows from all processes in the studied product system(s) drawing on a combination of different sources. The output is a compiled inv...

To ensure consistent reporting of life cycle assessment (LCA), we provide a report template. The report includes elements of an LCA study as recommended but the ILCD Handbook. Illustrative case study reported according to this template is presented in Chap. 39.

Energy systems are essential in the support of modern societies’ activities, and can span a wide spectrum of electricity and heat generation systems and cooling systems. Along with their central role and large diversity, these systems have been demonstrated to cause serious impacts on human health, ecosystems and natural resources. Over the past tw...

The goal definitionis the first phase of an LCA and determines the purpose of a study in detail. This chapter teaches how to perform the six aspects of a goal definition: (1) Intended applications of the results, (2) Limitations due to methodological choices, (3) Decision context and reasons for carrying out the study, (4) Target audience, (5) Comp...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has a number of defining characteristics that enables it to address questions that no other assessment tools can address. This chapter begins by demonstrating how the use of LCA in the late 2000s led to a drastic shift in the dominant perception that biofuels were “green”, “sustainable” or “carbon neutral”, which led to...

The chapter explores the application of LCA to solid waste management systems through the review of published studies on the subject. The environmental implications of choices involved in the modelling setup of waste management systems are increasingly in the spotlight, due to public health concerns and new legislation addressing the impacts from m...

This chapter is dedicated to the third phase of an LCA study, the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) where the life cycle inventory’s information on elementary flows is translated into environmental impact scores. In contrast to the three other LCA phases, LCIA is in practice largely automated by LCA software, but the underlying principles, models...

The scope definition is the second phase of an LCA. It determines what product systems are to be assessed and how this assessment should take place. This chapter teaches how to perform a scope definition. First, important terminology and key concepts of LCA are introduced. Then, the nine items making up a scope definition are elaborately explained:...

The chapter gives examples of applications of LCA by the central societal actors in government, industry and citizens, and discusses major motivations and challenges for the use of LCA to support science-based decision-making from their respective perspectives. We highlight applications of LCA in policy formulation, implementation and evaluation, p...

Educating engineering students in sustainability is becoming increasingly important since engineering is expected to play a vital role in solving the sustainability challenges facing us. At the Technical University of Denmark this awareness is visible in the strategy where sustainability is expected to be an integrated part of all study programmes....

To move towards environmentally-sustainable transport systems, electric vehicles (EVs) are increasingly seen as viable alternatives to internal combustion vehicles (ICVs). To ensure effectiveness of such deployment, holistic assessments of environmental impacts can help decision-makers determine optimised urban strategies in a long-term perspective...

To address sustainability challenges, photovoltaics (PV) are regarded as a promising renewable energy technology. Decreasing PV module costs and increasing residential electricity prices have made self-consumption of PV-generated electricity financially more attractive than exporting to the grid. Organic photovoltaics (OPV) are an emerging thin-fil...

As part of the Cradle to Cradle® (C2C) certification program, the C2C certification criterion, Renewable Energy and Carbon Management (RE&CM), focuses on use of electricity from renewable energy (RE) and direct greenhouse gas offsets in the manufacturing stage and, to a limited extent, on the cradle to gate only at the highest level of certificatio...

Increasing needs for decision support and advances in scientific knowledge within life cycle assessment (LCA) led to substantial efforts to provide global guidance on environmental life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) indicators under the auspices of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. As part of these efforts, a dedicated task force focused on ad...

PurposeBuilding on the rhetoric question “quo vadis?” (literally “Where are you going?”), this article critically investigates the state of the art of normalisation and weighting approaches within life cycle assessment. It aims at identifying purposes, current practises, pros and cons, as well as research gaps in normalisation and weighting. Based...

Organic photovoltaics (OPV) show promise of greatly improving the environmental and economic performance of PV compared to conventional silicon. Life cycle assessment studies have assessed the environmental impacts of OPV, but not under a self-consumption scheme for industrial facilities. We investigate the life cycle environmental impacts of elect...

To address the sustainability challenge, a large variety of footprints, aiming at capturing specific impacts of human activities on natural environment, have emerged. But, how do they fit into our addressing of environmental sustainability? Here, we build on a critical literature review to (1) provide an overview of existing footprints; (2) define...

As engineered nanomaterials are increasingly introduced on the market into a broad range of commodities or nanoproducts, there is a need for operational, reliable tool, enabling to consistently assess the risks and impacts associated with the releases of nanoparticles. The lack of a developed metric that accurately represents their toxic effects wh...

Livestock manure is commonly applied on agricultural land for its fertilising properties. However, the presence of toxic substances in animal manure such as pathogens, antibiotics and heavy metals, can result in damages to ecosystems and human health. To date, although relevant for policy-making, e.g. regulation framing, their releases to agricultu...

Studies have shown that releases of nanoparticles may take place through the life cycle of products embedding nanomaterials, thus resulting in potential impacts on ecosystems and human health. While several life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have assessed such products, only a few of them have quantitatively addressed the toxic impacts caused by r...

This chapter is dedicated to the third phase of an LCA study, the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) where the life cycle inventory's information on elementary flows is translated into environmental impact scores. In contrast to the three other LCA phases, LCIA is in practice largely automated by LCA software, but the underlying principles, models...

This study aims to assess the environmental impacts related to the provision of 1 kWh to the grid from wind power in Europe and to suggest how life cycle assessment can inform technology development and system planning. Four representative power plants onshore (with 2.3 and 3.2 MW turbines) and offshore (4.0 and 6.0 MW turbines) with 2015 state-of-...

Here, we review 33 life cycle assessment (LCA) studies of thin-film photovoltaic (PV) technologies that have had a holistic coverage in their assessments and/or have included ecodesign aspects. Only five of them were found to have a comprehensive life cycle and impact coverage, and their analyses highlighted the importance of (i) including the enti...

The effect of substituting the metal electrode materials in organic solar cells has been demonstrated to reduce significantly the environmental impacts of this technology. Four alternatives have been assessed and the conclusion is that other types of materials, such as carbon, should be further investigated by system designers and researchers in th...

Since the turn of the century a growing chorus of researchers has been espousing reduced meat and dairy intake as a partial strategy to transition towards a sustainable food system. Many of these studies have been predicated on a life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodology and though transparent in communicating their work within that framework, it has...

Over the last decade, the number of decentralized farm biogas plants has increased significantly in the EU. This development leads not only to an increasing amount of biogas produced, but also to a higher amount of digestate obtained. One of the most attractive options to manage the digestate is to apply it as biofertiliser to the soil, because thi...

The life cycle of a solar park made using organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology is assessed here. The modules have been fabricated in a pilot scale plant and they have been installed together with other components to evaluate the balance of system, in a solar park located in Denmark. Three possible waste management practices have been contemplated...