Annette Koehler

ETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering

Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies include a vast amount of different products. Often, extrapolations are necessary to obtain the life cycle inventory of a specific product. This article provides quantitative scaling factors with power (heat output) for product properties and life cycle impact assessment results of heat pump and biomass furnace te...

The environmental impact of the water consumption of four typical crop rotations grown in Spain, including energy crops, was analyzed and compared against Spanish agricultural and natural reference situations. The life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology was used for the assessment of the potential environmental impact of blue water (withdrawal from...

Purpose Though the development of biofuel has attracted numerous studies for quantifying potential water demand applying life cycle thinking, the impacts of biofuel water consumption still remain unknown. In this study, we aimed to quantify ecological impact associated with corn-based bioethanol water consumption in Minnesota in responding to diffe...

Wind energy is a fast-growing and promising renewable energy source. The investment costs of wind turbines have decreased over the years, making wind energy economically competitive to conventionally produced electricity. Size scaling in the form of a power law, experience curves and progress rates are used to estimate the cost development of ever-...

Global stress on water and land resources is increasing as a consequence of population growth and higher caloric food demand. Many terrestrial ecosystems have already massively been degraded for providing agricultural land, and water scarcity related to irrigation has damaged water dependent ecosystems. Coping with the food and biomass demand of an...

PurposeFreshwater use and consumption is of high environmental concern. While research has primarily focused on agricultural water use, industrial water use has recently become more prominent. Because most industries employ relatively low amounts of water, our study focuses on electricity production, which is involved in almost all economic activit...

Global crop production is causing pressure on water and land resources in many places. In addition to local resource management, the related environmental impacts of commodities traded along international supply chains need to be considered and managed accordingly. For this purpose, we calculate the specific water consumption and land use for the p...

The European legislation increasingly directs waste streams which cannot be recycled toward thermal treatment. Models are therefore needed that help to quantify emissions of waste incineration and thus reveal potential risks and mitigation needs. This study presents a probabilistic model which computes emissions as a function of waste composition a...

To date the impact of thermal emissions has not been addressed in life cycle assessment despite the narrow thermal tolerance of most aquatic species. A method to derive characterization factors for the impact of cooling water discharges on aquatic ecosystems was developed which uses space and time explicit integration of fate and effects of water t...

The environmental impact of land and water use in agriculture is highly variable on a global scale. Generally, these aspects dominate impact results of single score assessment methods such as eco-indicator 99 (EI99). Currently, no regional inventories have been provided on a global scale, and also regionalized, comprehen-sive impact assessment meth...

PurposeFreshwater scarcity is a problem in many areas of the world and will become one of the most sensitive environmental issues in coming decades. Existing life cycle assessment (LCA) methodologies generally do not provide assessment schemes or characterization factors of the potential environmental impacts of freshwater use or freshwater resourc...

An in-depth life-cycle assessment of nine home-care and personal-hygiene products was conducted to determine the ecological relevance of different life-cycle phases and compare the environmental profiles of products serving equal applications. Using detailed data from industry and consumer-behavior studies a broad range of environmental impacts wer...

A model for input- and technology-dependent cradle-to-gate life cycle assessments (LCA)was constructed to quantify emissions and resource consumption of various clinker production options. The model was compiled using data of more than 100 clinker production lines and complemented with literature data and best judgment from experts. It can be appli...

Life Cycle Assessment is a tool to assess the environmental impacts and resources used throughout a product's life cycle, i.e., from raw material acquisition, via production and use phases, to waste management. The methodological development in LCA has been strong, and LCA is broadly applied in practice. The aim of this paper is to provide a review...

A method for assessing the environmental impacts of freshwater consumption was developed. This method considers damages to three areas of protection: human health, ecosystem quality, and resources. The method can be used within most existing life-cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods. The relative importance of water consumption was analyzed by in...

Background, aim and scope In 2005, a comprehensive comparison of life cycle impact assessment toxicity characterisation models was initiated by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)-Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) Life Cycle Initiative, directly involving the model developers of CalTOX, IMPACT 2002, USES-LCA, BETR...

Industrial wastewater-treatment systems need to ensure a high level of protection for the environment as a whole. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) comprehensively evaluates the environmental impacts of complex treatment systems, taking into account impacts from auxiliaries and energy consumption as well as emissions. However, the application of LCA is l...

Industrial wastewater treatment in the chemical industry aims at eliminating organic contaminants, as these pollutants may be persistent and ecotoxic. In a case study performed in collaboration with the chemical industry, we investigated the removal of a fluorescent whitening agent and its side products in the wastewater-treatment system. Adsorptio...

Under the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative the six most commonly used characterization models for toxic impacts from chemicals were compared and harmonized through a sequence of workshops removing differences which were unintentional or unnecessary. A parsimonious (as simple as possible but as complex as needed) and transparent consensus model, USE...