Ben Amor

• Eng, Ph.D.
• Professor at Université de Sherbrooke

When life cycle assessment (LCA) results do not show a clear and certain environmental preference of one choice over one or several alternatives, current methods are limited in their ability to inform decision-makers. To address this and related cross-cutting issues, a group of LCA practitioners has been working on a roadmap for capacity developmen...

We can now share a full-text view-only version of your paper by using this link (http://rdcu.be/nh8Z) All readers of the article via the shared link will also be able to use Enhanced PDF features such as annotation tools, one-click supplements, citation file exports and article metrics. Purpose Electricity is one of the main contributors to global...

Various green building rating systems (GBRSs) have been proposed to reduce the environmental impact of buildings. However, these GBRSs, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) v4, are primarily oriented toward a building's use stage energy consumption. Their application in contexts involving a high share of renewable energy, an...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a consistent and systematic integration framework of sustainable development (SD) in a civil engineering (CE) curriculum given the connection between the two. Curriculum integration is a challenging project and requires the development of certain protocols to ensure success. Design/methodology/appro...

With the demonstrated ability to perform calculations in seconds that would take classical supercomputers thousands of years, quantum computers namely hold the promise of radically advancing sustainable IT. However, quantum computers face challenges due to the inherent noise in physical qubits, necessitating error correction for reliable operation...

Quantum computing is emerging as a transformative technology with the announced potential to solve large-scale problems that are currently intractable for classical computers. With the demonstrated ability to perform calculations in seconds that would take classical supercomputers thousands of years, quantum computers namely hold the promise of rad...

One of the key challenges in conducting consequential life cycle assessment (LCA) is to identify and quantify what is likely to be affected by changes in market behavior—so‐called marginal effects. Although the critical importance of uncertainty and sensitivity assessments in attributional LCA is recognized, they are rarely conducted in consequenti...

Clinker and cement production is an energy-intensive and high resource requirement industry with significant environmental impacts, and yet, there is a dearth of environmental research in Tunisia on its Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Additionally, there is a tendency either to overlook or underestimate the selection of appropriate life cycle impact a...

The application of eco‐design principles in the building sector is considered a promising way to mitigate its substantial environmental impacts. However, quantitative evidence for this mitigation potential is lacking. The objective of this study was to quantify the environmental performance of diverse eco‐design strategies when applied to the build...

Thermal spray is a family of surface engineering technologies necessary to meet technical functionalities of components under harsh environmental conditions. Those technologies come at the expense of dissipative losses of coating materials throughout the life cycle of components. Measuring these material losses has so far retained little attention...

Bridge decks often face common issues such as concrete cracking, spalling, and deterioration. As a proactive approach to extend the bridge’s service life, necessary measures must be implemented on a preventive, cyclic, or condition-driven basis. Selecting the most suitable materials for rehabilitating bridge decks is a pressing concern in extending...

When addressing concrete carbonation as a carbon mitigation option, studies leave out the effect that a temporal difference between the CO2 emissions and uptake happening throughout concrete’s life cycle have on climate change. In this study, the role played by carbonation on concrete’s carbon mitigation potential is investigated through a dynamic...

The freight transportation sector accounted for 10.1% of global emissions and 16.2% of Quebec's greenhouse gas emissions in 2018. In this sector, the most salient yet little explored behavioral change opportunity is the modal shift from heavy trucks to trains. Current model developments are being made so that E4 modelers represent modal choices as...

Wood products can have a lower impact on climate change (CC) than other building materials, and their carbon content can transform buildings into temporary carbon sinks. However, the large-scale use of wood products in buildings requires a better understanding of their consequences to support CC policies. The consequential life cycle inventory of s...

Building is affiliated with much of the social impact and benefits. However, for long term assessments that can capture indirect consequences, the current common attributional approach is lacking. The challenge become more obvious with large data amounts required to perform social life cycle assessment (S-LCA), and often less representative non sit...

Energy improvements in the energy sector constitute a key strategy to mitigate climate change. These expected improvements increasingly depend on the development of materials with improved surface characteristics. To prospectively assess the large-scale benefits and trade-offs of such novel surface engineering (SE) technology deployments in the ene...

The Government of Canada has embraced circular economy and is supporting an increasing number of initiatives in the field. However, implementation examples remain scattered and certain stakeholders are eager to see a greater level of commitment from policy makers. The purpose of this study is to provide a Canadian perspective on how, and to what ex...

Several studies have shown the benefits of using timber in the construction sector in terms of climate change, which has received the support of decision-makers. However, few studies focus on other environmental indicators. The environmental impacts (i.e., such as human health, ecosystem quality, and resources) of material substitutions , consequen...

In the context of a low environmental impact energy mix, the embodied energy of building materials can account for up to 46% of a building's life cycle energy over a 50-year service life. Fifty percent of this energy corresponds to the combination of the structure and building envelope. While most studies have compared different residential buildin...

With the increasing globalization of waste-derived raw materials, region-oriented circular economy measures that stimulate resource recovery can cause far-reaching ripple effects in geographically dispersed markets, with unintended environmental effects. Identifying, quantifying, and characterizing these implications in a multiregional economic sys...

The growing popularity of the concepts of circular economy and resource cascade has intensified the need for consistent handling of multifunctionality-related challenges when modeling multiple cycles in life cycle assessment (LCA). In LCA, end-of-life upcy-cling and downcycling effects (also known as quality changes), triggered by the presence of m...

Although it is not yet current practice in life cycle assessment, it is recommended that impact assessment methods be accompanied by their uncertainty data to better guide the decision maker. This work uses the best available information to assess uncertainty of the AWARE model for water scarcity and corresponding sensitivities of input parameters....

Considering the volume of plastic generation and its persistence in nature, the management of plastic wastes has gained increasing attention globally. To select the most environmentally sustainable solution, insights in the environmental impacts of different management strategies are crucial. This study thus aimed to evaluate different plastic wast...

As considerable amount of waste materials and by-products are generated from the urban and industrial production systems, efforts to utilize such materials resourcefully have received increasing attention in order to increase the use of recycled materials and reduce landfill disposal. In addition, construction products often induce significant envi...

To decarbonize the portland cement sector worldwide, the Cement Sustainability Initiative recommends systematically reducing the clinker-to-cement ratio down to 60% by 2050. However, the sources of usable clinker substitutes-the supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs)-are unevenly distributed geographically and will become increasingly scarce i...

Transportation is a key factor in the fight against climate change. Consumer behavior changes in transportation are underrepresented in energy policies, even if they could be essential to achieve the fixed GHG emission reduction targets. To help quantify the role of behaviors in energy transition and their implications on the dynamics of an energy...

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...

Buildings are accountable for much of the resource consumption and CO2 emissions generated from human activities. Nonetheless, the focus of building life cycle assessment (LCA) studies to evaluate the environmental footprint are more commonly adopted in an attributional approach. Nevertheless, understanding a direct and indirect consequences in lar...

full open access text here: https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/5/1/20 Abstract: The building sector is responsible for extensive resource consumption and waste generation, resulting in high pressure on the environment. A way to potentially mitigate this is by including environmental considerations during building design through the concept known as e...

Although it is an abundant recyclable resource, mixed colour waste glass does not meet quality standards to be recycled and is often landfilled in Quebec (Canada). Glass powder (GP) has been shown to have pozzolanic properties; it therefore has potential application in the concrete industry as an alternative supplementary cementitious material. The...

The comparability of environmental product declarations (EPDs) and the heterogeneity of their life cycle assessment (LCA) methods are considered the main challenges facing the credibility of results. In this study, a probabilistic tool was proposed and developed to gain insight into what is necessary to achieve the unrealized vision of comparable E...

Shifting to more circular supply chains is likely to have uneven economic and environmental implications among stakeholders within an industrial symbiosis. However, current macroeconomic models fail to capture such complex interactions with high material and spatiotemporal resolution. To address this issue, this paper presents an economic time-seri...

The circular economy (CE) concept has received increasing attention among different parties on various levels recently. Due to the concern on significant resources consumption in the construction industry without concerning the physical limit resources, a paradigm shift of linear economy to CE model is inevitable for conserving the resources and pr...

Abstract Most self-proclaimed sustainable neighborhoods cover various concepts pertaining to the economic, social, environmental, and institutional pillars of sustainability. Depending on the developers’ motivations, these concepts can be integrated unevenly. This study develops a framework to characterise the gap between what is advocated as neces...

Environmental indicators based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) method are integrated into an energy system model (ESM). This integration allows for the generation of comprehensive environmental assessments of future energy systems and for determining energy scenarios with low environmental impacts and moderate cost increases. In Switzerland, whi...

In the construction sector, wood products are gaining interest. Methods are necessary to quantify material use and evaluate their potential effects. When quantifying the building material consumption, many studies are limited to residential buildings due to the lack of data for non-residential buildings. This research aimed at investigating a metho...

Global warming mitigation strategies are likely to affect human health and biodiversity through diverse cause-effect mechanisms. To analyse these effects, we implement a methodology to link TIMES energy models with life cycle assessment using open-source software. The proposed method uses a cut-off to identify the most relevant processes. These pro...

À la suite de la ratification de l’Accord de Paris sur le climat en 2016, le Canada s’est fixé un objectif de réduction de ses émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) de 30% en dessous du niveau de 2005 d’ici 2030. L’atteinte de ces objectifs requiert l’adoption d’initiatives de développement durable ambitieuses et progressives dans tous les secteu...

Buildings are responsible for a considerable portion of the embodied and operational CO2 emitted by human activities. Some building attributes have taken on the mantle of “environmentally preferable”. Through a systematic literature review, this paper investigates if the literature on whole building Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) confirms some enviro...

Previously perceived as a rapid prototyping technique, additive manufacturing (AM) has evolved into a fully developed manufacturing process, with growing accessibility to different industrial sectors. Its technological and economic advantages are frequently documented, but AM's environmental performance is seldom investigated. Not long ago discrete...

Interest in intrinsically low-energy construction materials is becoming mainstream, and bio-based materials form a key part of that group of materials. The goal of this study was to analyse the environmental impact of applying a sol-gel coating on hemp shiv, in order to improve the durability of this innovative bio-based material, using a regionali...

Wood products are gaining interest in the building sector, due to their potential in sequestering greenhouse gas emissions. However, increasing wood materials use in the built market can have unforeseen changes in the material supply chains. Consequential Life Cycle Assessment (CLCA) allows the assessment of changes in material supply chain. To qua...

Purpose The long-term marginal electricity supply mixes of 40 countries were generated and integrated into version 3.4 of the ecoinvent consequential database. The total electricity production originating from these countries accounts for 77% of the current global electricity generation. The goal of this article is to provide an overview of the met...

Urbanisme durable et économie circulaire sont deux notions au coeur des politiques publiques de la majorité des pays occidentaux. Néanmoins, leurs points de convergence et de divergence sont encore mal connus en raison: 1) d'un concept de "quartier durable" multifacette et difficile à appréhender, 2) d'une articulation encore floue entre circularit...

Purpose While many examples have shown unsustainable use of freshwater resources, existing LCIA methods for water use do not comprehensively address impacts to natural resources for future generations. This framework aims to (1) define freshwater resource as an item to protect within the Area of Protection (AoP) natural resources, (2) identify rele...

The benefits of aluminum lamination in improving the physical and mechanical properties of wood-based composites is now well documented. This paper shows the contribution of life cycle assessment (LCA) as a tool to assess and compare the environmental footprint in the development of laminated panels. SimaPro 9.0 software, using Ecoinvent database w...

Research Highlights: This is the first study that analyzes the environmental performance of wood-based phase change material (PCM) panels. Background and Objectives: Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful environmental management tool. However, a full LCA, especially during the early design phase of a product, is far too time and data intensive...

Sustainability decision making is a complex task for policy makers, considering the possible unseen consequences it may entail. With a broader scope covering environmental, economic, and social aspects, Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) is a promising holistic method to deal with that complexity. However, to date, this method is limited t...

While the main findings of this paper can be found in the main manuscript, description of modeling details, input data, and supporting results are provided in the supporting information.

This Excel file includes all the input data used for modeling the case study.

Lack of dynamic accounting in consequential life cycle assessment (CLCA) can keep policy-makers from having an accurate analysis of emission flows over time. In this study, we propose a dynamic CLCA framework to assess the environmental consequences of pavements. Dynamic changes in the demand vector and technosphere matrices were computed using rel...

Purpose Several efforts have attempted to incorporate the sources of uncertainty and variability into the life cycle assessment (LCA) of pavements. However, no method has been proposed that can simultaneously consider data quality, methodological choices, and variability in inputs and outputs without the need for complementary software. This study...

The design and study of low carbon buildings is a major concern in a modern economy due to high carbon emissions produced by buildings and its effects on climate change. Studies have investigated (CFP) Carbon Footprint of buildings, but there remains a need for a strong analysis that measure and quantify the overall degree of GHG emissions reductio...

Stationary batteries are projected to play a role in the electricity system of Switzerland after 2030. By enabling the integration of surplus production from intermittent renewables, energy storage units displace electricity production from different sources and potentially create environmental benefits. Nevertheless, batteries can also cause subst...

The energy supply chain is the backbone of industrialised societies, but it is also one of the leading causes of global environmental burden. Life cycle management (LCM) and life cycle assessment (LCA) are increasingly being used in combination with energy system optimisation models (ESOM) to better represent the energy sector and its dynamics, and...

Wood is increasingly perceived as a renewable, sustainable building material. The carbon it contains, biogenic carbon, comes from biological processes; it is characterized by a rapid turnover in the global carbon cycle. Increasing the use of harvested wood products (HWP) from sustainable forest management could provide highly needed mitigation effo...

The government of Quebec (Canada) is trying to find a useful outlet for the mixed waste glass pilling up in its landfills. One solution to consider is the use of fine glass powder from mixed waste glass as alternative cementitious materials (ACM) in concrete, using an open-loop circular-economy principle. To quantify the environmental feasibility...

PurposeLife cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners face many challenges in their efforts to describe, share, review, and revise their product system models, and to reproduce the models and results of others. Current life cycle inventory modeling techniques have weaknesses in the areas of describing model structure, documenting the use of proxy or non...

The transition to low carbon societies may increase peak electricity demand, which can be costly to supply with renewable energy, whose availability is uncertain. Buildings are often the main cause of peak demand, and they are believed to hold a large unrealised energy-efficiency potential. If realised, this potential could considerably mitigate th...

Approximately 14,000 underground manholes (UM) are used for the connection and maintenance of the electricity distribution network in Quebec (Canada). These underground reinforced concrete structures are subjected to an aggressive environment (moisture, salts, acidity, temperature) leading to premature deterioration of the concrete and corrosion of...

Marginal electricity supply mixes provided in previous versions of the ecoinvent database were based on historical data and limited by database features. This did not allow to capture accurately the consequences of additional demand for electricity given the complex nature of power markets. This work provides long-term and consistent marginal elect...

Over the last few decades, wood modification has been performed to improve wood product technical performance. Using renewable based chemicals for wood modification is an innovative alternative to the non-renewable petrochemicals commonly used. However, it should be kept in mind that having the raw material from renewable sources does not guarantee...

Various Green Building Rating Systems (GBRS) have been proposed to reduce the environmental impact of buildings. However, these GBRS, such as LEED v4, are primarily oriented towards a building`s use stage energy consumption. Their application in contexts involving a high share of renewable energy, and hence a low impact electricity mix, can result...

Curriculum integration of sustainable development (SD) is an integral part of achieving integration of SD in higher education. Given the obvious connection between the fields of civil engineering and SD, curriculum integration of sustainability in the field of civil engineering has been attempted via various methods. As a part of curriculum integra...

The installed capacity of stationary batteries is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. This deployment will have impacts on the environment that must be investigated to guide our policy and technology choices. A large variety of stationary battery technologies exists, however previous studies have failed to assess the environmental implica...

Consequential life cycle assessment of stationary batteries in the context of Quebec.

Environmental assessments are crucial for the management of the environmental impacts of a product in a rapidly developing world. The design phase creates opportunities for acting on the environmental issues of products using life cycle assessment (LCA). However, the LCA is hampered by a lack of information originating from distinct scales along th...

Présentation Souvent, on associe développement durable et écologie. Pourtant, le concept de développement durable recouvre plus que l'environnement. En fait, il inclut trois grandes dimensions qui s'interpellent et s'entrecroisent : humaine, économique et environnementale. Si la nécessité d'adopter les principes et les valeurs du développement dura...

Road construction and maintenance are both important consumers of natural resources and energy. The two main pavement types used today, in the province of Quebec, is asphalt and cement concrete pavement. This branch of the construction industry has a significant impact on the environment and, therefore, it could be of interest to find out which of...

Distributed generation (DG) using renewable energy systems (RES) can play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Given that DG could overlap with carbon tax implementation, the objective of this work is to assess the implications of introducing different carbon tax levels (from 0 to 100 US$/tonne of CO 2) and to assess the GH...

An extensive growth in pavement life cycle assessment studies is noticed in recent years. Current literature in pavement life cycle assessment demonstrates a wide range of implications on environmental burdens associated with the pavements. However, immature parts still remain, needing further research, in the next years, in different stages of pav...

With financial support from the provincial ministry for education, two universities and five colleges in Quebec are developing a project towards integrating sustainable development (SD) in the curriculum. This project is not only dedicated to teaching but is also expanded to: (1) professors’ support using various activities (conferences, workshops...

Electricity supply is often cited as a significant hot spot in life cycle assessment results, and consequently in life cycle management results. Despite its importance, however, practitioners continue to overuse generic LCI data and different simplified methodologies regarding electricity supply modeling. Such simplifications and inconsistencies ca...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148114002389 Electricity supply is frequently cited as a significant hot spot in life cycle assessment (LCA) results. Despite its importance, however, LCA research continues to overuse simplified methodologies regarding electricity supply modeling. This work aims to demonstrate the usefulness o...

With the growing share of wind production, understanding its impacts on electricity price and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions becomes increasingly relevant, especially to design better wind-supporting policies. Internal grid congestion is usually not taken into account when assessing the price impact of fluctuating wind output. Using 2006–2011 hourl...