Guido Sonnemann

University of Bordeaux · Department of Science and Technology

Purpose This paper aims at assessing the alignment of eight of the Life Cycle Initiative’s ten principles for life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) and the LCSA practice as well as the challenges to reaching the full implementation of the principles as a basis for a harmonized framework. Materials and methods To understand the extent of alig...

Purpose Using plastic for strawberry cultivation (so-called plasticulture) is widespread to extend cultivation, reduce weed stress and water and nutrient demand, and protect plants. We assess the environmental impacts of different plasticulture methods, including possible impacts caused by the (accidental) emission of plastics. The goals are to hel...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are gaining relevance as sustainable urban actions because of their potential to provide multiple benefits in the form of ecosystem services (ES), and thus mitigate urban challenges. This paper presents an original semi-dynamic modelling framework that simultaneously considers i) ES supply and demand dynamics, ii) negat...

This paper aims to develop a Life Cycle Assessment-based methodology to assess and compare the potential burden shifting between indoor air quality and energy consumption, as well as between the building construction and use stages, focusing on three insulation materials. We model the complete cause-to-effect chain to determine the mass of substanc...

By analogy to conventional environmental impacts, the potential release of debris or generation of fragments can be considered as the emission of an environmental stressor damaging the orbital ‘natural’ resource which supports space activities. Hence, it appears relevant to integrate systematically the impact of the emission of debris on the orbita...

Purpose The accessibility to most metals is crucial to modern societies. In order to move towards more sustainable use of metals, it is relevant to reduce losses along their anthropogenic cycle. To this end, quantifying dissipative flows of mineral resources and assessing their impacts in life cycle assessment (LCA) has been a challenge brought up...

Like any industry, space activities generate pressures on the environment and strives towards more sustainable activities. A consensus among the European industrial stakeholders and national agencies in the Space sector is emerging on the need to address eco-design through the prism of the environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. Whil...

Nowadays, product designers, manufacturers, and consumers consider the environmental impacts of products, processes, and services in their decision-making process. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool that assesses the environmental impacts over a product’s life cycle. Conducting a life cycle assessment (LCA) requires meticulous data sourcing and...

Fisheries and aquaculture are becoming a focus of societal concern driven by globalization and increasing environmental degradation, mainly caused by climate change and marine litter. In response to this problem, the European Atlantic Area NEPTUNUS project aims to support and inform about the sustainability of the seafood sector, boosting the trans...

At a global level, it has been scientifically reported that the processes of water purification, management and disposal of wastewater, and solid waste generate environmental impacts, especially they contribute to global warming potential (GWP), which, in turn, is caused by the greenhouse gases emissions (GHGs). In this context, the main objective...

Purpose We observe a methodological gap for assessing impacts within the Area of Protection (AoP) Natural Resources in LCA with regard to concerns about the accessibility to raw materials. Adding criticality considerations as a complement to environmental LCA addresses abiotic resources accessibility. We present a study that integrates and applies...

In the past twenty years, green analytical chemistry has gained more and more attention. However, quantification of the environmental impacts of analytical methods has never been estimated. The purpose of this work is to apply life cycle assessment (LCA) to the preparation of one sample using SBSE and SPE techniques and to show that LCA is a suitab...

In the past twenty years, analytical chemistry scientists have developed tools to assess the "greenness" of their analytical methods. The purpose of this work is to review these tools against criteria inspired by the life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. Results show that the reviewed tools are ready- and easy-to use but they are also limited in t...

Important advances have been made to define the multiple impact pathways relating mineral resource use to the area of protection (AoP) natural resources in life cycle assessment (LCA). Yet, the link between stakeholders’ interests and the aspects relevant to resource use as addressed by existing impact assessment methods has so far only marginally...

Fossil fuels are the dominant form of storable energy, but their share in the global energy supply is slowly diminishing due to climate mitigation policies. Alternative energy production from variable renewable energy sources for both stationary and mobile use requires some form of energy storage. Batteries are the current frontrunner for this appl...

This review examines how life cycle methodologies are presently used by regional authorities in their sustainable development programmes. The review incorporates formal methods of life cycle assessment (LCA) as well as non-standardised approaches like life cycle management (LCM). The review describes the sustainability agenda facing regions, and a...

Nowadays, decision-makers, including product designers, manufacturers and consumers, are interested in knowing the environmental impacts of their products, processes and services. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool that assesses the environmental impacts of a product system over its life cycle. An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is one o...

Plastic debris into the environment is a growing threat for the ecosystems and human health. The seafood sector is particularly concerned because it generates plastic losses and can be endangered by plastic contamination. Life cycle assessment (LCA) does not properly consider plastic losses and related impacts, which is a problem in order to find r...

Packaging is fundamental for food preservation and transportation but generates an environmental burden from its production and end‐of‐life management. This review evaluates packaging contribution to the environmental performance of seafood products. Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies were evaluated by both qualitative and quantitative analysis. T...

Purpose and context This paper aims to establish principles for the increased application and use of life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA). Sustainable development (SD) encompassing resilient economies and social stability of the global system is growingly important for decision-makers from business and governments. The “17 SDGs” emerge as a...

PurposePartitioning is often recommended as allocation procedure in attributional Life Cycle Assessments (a-LCAs). However, little guidance is available on how to apply partitioning to recycled products. This paper aims to demonstrate and discuss the application of the allocation procedure allocation at the point of substitution (APOS) via an evalu...

Purpose How to apply allocation in an life cycle assessment (LCA) is a long-running and controversial debate. Consensus seems to exist on the fact that the allocation procedure should follow logically from the LCA goal definition. This paper proposes to use an axiomatic method to (1) identify an allocation procedure for co-production, joint treatme...

The dissipation of metals leads to potential environmental impacts, usually evaluated for product systems with life cycle assessment. Dissipative flows of metals become inaccessible for future users, going against the common goal of a more circular economy. Therefore, they should be addressed in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) in the area of pr...

The Landes de Gascogne forest, located in southwestern France, spans nearly 10,000 km2 and consists largely of maritime pine (Pinus pinaster). This forest in unique to Europe because it is almost entirely created and managed by man for specific industries. On the basis of a material flow analysis, we assessed the upstream supply chain of maritime p...

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...

Nature-based Solutions (NBS) are increasingly promoted to support sustainable and resilient urban planning. However, design and planning urban NBS targeted at the needs of the local context require knowledge about the causal relationships between NBS, ecosystem services (ES) and urban challenges (UC) This paper aims at contributing to this knowledg...

The application of circularity strategies to improve resource use and recovery should be considered with their potential impacts on the environment. Their effectiveness could be evaluated by combining the material circularity indicator (MCI) and life cycle assessment (LCA) methods. Environmental trade-offs may be underestimated for some strategies...

This article presents an approach to integrating life cycle assessment (LCA) into an activity‐based costing (ABC) model to develop a steering system that takes into account both financial costs and associated environmental impacts. By combining the formalism of LCA and ABC matrix calculations, we show how impact assessment results can be affiliated...

The Geopolitical Supply Risk method, originally developed by Gemechu et al. (2016) and subsequently extended by Helbig et al. (2016a) and Cimprich et al. (2017, 2018), is aimed at incorporating supply risk assessment of “critical raw materials” as a complement to environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) within life cycle sustainability assessment...

Concerns have risen in recent years about the accessibility of raw materials considered “critical” for technological advancements. The GeoPolRisk indicator was designed as a midpoint indicator in life cycle sustainability assessment to measure geopolitical supply risk with the aim to incorporate raw material criticality as a complement to environme...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely applied in many different sectors, but the marine products and seafood segment have received relatively little attention in the past. In recent decades, global fish production experienced sustained growth and peaked at about 179 million tonnes in 2018. Consequently, increased interest in the environmental...

The selection of an appropriate allocation procedure for co-production and recycling in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) depends on the goal and scope of the analysis. However, it is not always clear when partitioning or system expansion can be applied, or when to conduct an attributional or a consequential LCA, both for LCA practitioners and users of L...

Like any industry, space activities generate pressures on the environment and strives towards more sustainable activities. A consensus among the European industrial stakeholders and national agencies in the Space sector is emerging on the need to address eco-design through the prism of the environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. Whil...

The Forum for Sustainability through Life Cycle Innovation (FSLCI), the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety, and Energy Technology UMSICHT and the Université de Bordeaux organized a joint workshop on the subject of "Linking the Life Cycle Inventory and Impact Assessment of Marine Litter and Plastic Emissions" on 18th March 2020. The work...

Satellites orbiting Earth are used in many areas and disciplines, including space science, Earth observation, meteorology, climate research. A rising sustainability concern is occurring in the space sector: 29,000 human-made objects, larger than 10cm, are orbiting the Earth but only 6% are operational spacecraft. The others, considered as space deb...

Global low‐carbon transition demands the development of large‐scale infrastructure, which is sand intensive. Natural sand is widely considered abundant, whereas recent research has pointed out the increasing risk of supply shortage in a number of world regions. In the current research, we examine the implication of future sand demand in the context...

The assessment of the criticality of raw materials allows the identification of the likelihood of a supply disruption of a material and the vulnerability of a system (e.g. a national economy, technology, or company) to this disruption. Inconclusive outcomes of various studies suggest that criticality assessments would benefit from the identificatio...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-020-01736-6 free view only version: https://rdcu.be/b1dDH Purpose The safeguard subject of the Area of Protection “natural Resources,” particularly regarding mineral resources, has long been debated. Consequently, a variety of life cycle impact assessment methods based on different concepts are ava...

PurposeAssessing impacts of abiotic resource use has been a topic of persistent debate among life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method developers and a source of confusion for life cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners considering the different interpretations of the safeguard subject for mineral resources and the resulting variety of LCIA methods...

Data quality of life cycle inventory background databases should be ensured in order to be useful for life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. However, databases do not always have procedures to evaluate the quality of the datasets in place. The Global Guidance Principles for LCA Databases of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in collaborati...

The European seafood and aquaculture sectors are facing important challenges in terms of environmental threats (climate change, marine debris, resources depletion), social development (worker rights, consumer's awareness) or economic growth (market and nonmarket goods and services, global competitiveness). These issues are forcing all stakeholders,...

The space industry generates pressures on the environment and strives towards more sustainable activities. Several actors of or related to the European space industry, such as ArianeGroup or and the European Space Agency (ESA), have identified the life cycle assessment methodology (LCA) as the most appropriate methodology to measure and then suppor...

Like any industry, space activities generate pressures on the environment and strives towards more sustainable activities. A consensus among the European industrial stakeholders and national agencies in the Space sector is emerging on the need to address eco-design through the prism of the environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. Whil...

The assessment of the criticality of raw materials allows the identification of the likelihood of a supply disruption of a material and the vulnerability of a system (e.g. a national economy, technology, or company) to this disruption. Inconclusive outcomes of various studies suggest that criticality assessments would benefit from the identificatio...

Purpose Due to the increased consumption of carbon fibers, it is expected that an important amount of carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP)-based products will enter in the coming years, at the end of their life cycle. Considering the challenges ahead in the establishment of a new recycling sector, it is appropriate to investigate the sustainable...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has proven its worth in modelling the entire value chain associated with the production of goods and services. However, modelling the consumption system, such as the use phase of a product, remains challenging due to uncertainties in the socio-economic context. Agent-based models (ABMs) can reduce these uncertainties by...

Global consumption of carbon fibers reinforced plastic (CFRP) is rising and the management of waste is an issue of high concern. In order to implement a sustainable carbon fiber recycling sector, there is a need to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of recycling processes. In this context, we compared current end-of-life scenarios (landf...

An addition of reduced graphene oxide to nickel–cobalt hydroxide electrodes results in net reduction of cumulative energy demand due to improved electrochemical properties.

Solar chargers for mobile phones are the first integration of organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology into commercial products. Although environmental impacts of OPVs have been studied extensively, the performance of chargers have been narrowly examined in reference to intensity of their use and use geographies. To explore these aspects, we study the...

Ressource dissipation Space debris Atmospheric reentry