Guillaume Majeau-Bettez

Polytechnique Montréal · Department of Chemical Engineering

Most life cycle assessment (LCA) studies use the attributional methodology. This approach attributes a share of global environmental impacts to one or multiple functions provided by a normatively circumscribed system. Multifunctional systems that are not technologically subdivisible between co‐functions are frequently encountered in LCA studies. It...

This study contrasts two different approaches to inform European‐scale decision‐making to mitigate the environmental impacts of the end‐of‐life tires (ELT) management system. The first analysis is a traditional life cycle assessment (LCA) that compares the environmental performances of the 12 main available European end‐of‐life (EOL) technologies i...

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...

Aluminum recycling follows a downcycling dynamic where wrought alloys are transformed into cast alloys, accumulating tramp elements at every cycle. With the saturation of stocks of aluminum and the reduction of the demand for cast alloy due to electrification of transport, improvement in the recycling system must be made to avoid a surplus of unuse...

Recycling is a commonly acknowledged strategy to reduce the environmental impacts linked to primary resource exploitation. Large regional variations can be observed in recycling processes’ parameters, like efficiency, energy mix and treatment of rejects. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used to evaluate the environmental impacts of recycling p...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method to evaluate the environmental impacts of technologies from cradle to grave. However, LCAs are commonly defined in terms of the consumption of a single unit of a product and thus ignore scaling issues in large‐scale deployment of technologies. Such product‐level LCAs often do not consider capital manufacturing...

Aluminum is an energy‐intensive material that is typically used as an alloy. The environmental impacts caused by its production can potentially be spread out over multiple uses through repeated recycling loops. However, inter‐alloy contamination can limit the circularity of aluminum, which highlights the importance of analyzing prospective stock dy...

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...

Ecological modernisation in the form of support to the notion of green growth remains the dominant discourse in environmental policy globally. Still, questions of limits to economic expansion and growth on a planet with finite natural resources have been at the core of environmental discourses at least since the 1970's. A recent effort by Stoknes a...

The climate mitigation benefits of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) relative to internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) are highly dependent on the carbon intensity of the electricity consumed during their production and use-phase. A consistent and dynamic approach to grid-mix regionalization of BEV life-cycle assessments in Europe is therefore...

Aluminium is an energy intensive material with an environmental footprint strongly dependent on the electricity mix consumed by the smelting process. This study models prospective environmental impacts of primary aluminium production according to different integrated assessment modeling scenarios building on Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their...

Hybrid life cycle assessment (HLCA) strives to combine process‐based life cycle assessment (PLCA) and environmentally extended input–output (EEIO) analysis to bridge gaps of both methodologies. The recent development of HLCA databases constitutes a major step forward in achieving complete system coverage. Nevertheless, current applications of HLCA...

The Circular Economy (CE) movement is inspiring new governmental policies along with company strategies. This led to the emergence of a plethora of indicators to quantify the “circularity” of individual companies or products. Approaches behind these indicators builds mainly on two implicit assumptions. The first is that closing material loops at pr...

Process‐based Life Cycle Assessments (PLCA) rely on detailed descriptions of extensive value chains and their associated exchanges with the environment, but major data gaps limit the completeness of these system descriptions and lead to truncations in inventories and underestimations of impacts. Hybrid Life Cycle Assessments (HLCA) aim to combine t...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is gaining importance worldwide in guiding waste management policies. The capacity of co-products such as recycled materials and recovered energy to avoid primary production of equivalent products largely determines the environmental performance of waste treatment technologies. Estimating the reductions in resource use,...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmentally extended input–output analyses (EEIOA) are two techniques commonly used to assess environmental impacts of an activity/product. Their strengths and weaknesses are complementary, and they are thus regularly combined to obtain hybrid LCAs. A number of approaches in hybrid LCA exist, which leads to diffe...

While life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool often used to evaluate the environmental impacts of products and technologies, the amount of data required to perform such studies make the evaluation of emerging technologies using the conventional LCA approach challenging. The development paradox is such that the inputs from a comprehensive environmenta...

Recently, rechargeable aluminum batteries have received much attention due to their low cost, easy operation, and high safety. As the research into rechargeable aluminum batteries with a room-temperature ionic liquid electrolyte is relatively new, research efforts have focused on finding suitable electrode materials. An understanding of the environ...

With the growth of the field of industrial ecology (IE), research and results have increased significantly leading to a desire for better utilization of the accumulated data in more sophisticated analyses. This implies the need for greater transparency, accessibility, and reusability of IE data, paralleling the considerable momentum throughout the...

Many countries see biofuels as a replacement to fossil fuels to mitigate climate change. Nevertheless, some concerns remain about the overall benefits of biofuels policies. More comprehensive tools seem required to evaluate indirect effects of biofuel policies. This article proposes a method to evaluate large-scale biofuel policies that is based on...

The divide between attributional and consequential research perspectives partly overlaps with the long-standing methodological discussions in the life cycle assessment (LCA) and input-output analysis (IO) research communities on the choice of techniques and models for dealing with situations of coproduction. The recent harmonization of LCA allocat...

Financial balance is fundamental to input–output (IO) analysis, and consequently the respect of this balance is one of the dominant criteria in evaluating IO constructs. Kop Jansen, and ten Raa [(1990) The Choice of Model in the Construction of Input–Output Coefficients Matrices. International Economic Review 31, 213] proved that the byproduct-tech...

Recently, Merciai and Heijungs (2014) demonstrated that monetary input-output (IO) analysis can lead to system descriptions that do not conserve mass when the assumption of homogeneous prices is violated. They warn that this violation of basic balance laws can lead to biased estimates of environmental impacts, and they therefore recommend performin...

The complexity of data and methods in industrial ecology (IE) keeps growing, and the demand for comprehensive and interdisciplinary assessments increases. To keep up with this development, the field needs a data infrastructure that allows researchers to annotate, store, retrieve, combine, and exchange data at low cost, without loss of information,...

A wide spectrum of accounting frameworks and models is available to describe socioeconomic metabolism (SEM). Despite the common system of study, a large variety of terms and representations of that system are used by different models. This makes it difficult for practitioners to compare and choose a model or model combination that is fit for purpos...

Industrial ecology (IE) is a maturing scientific discipline. The field is becoming more data and computation intensive, which requires IE researchers to develop scientific software to tackle novel research questions. We review the current state of software programming and use in our field and find challenges regarding transparency, reproducibility,...

Conservation of mass and energy are essential to physical accounting, just as price and market balances are essential to economic accounting. These principles guide data collection and inventory compilation in industrial ecology. The resulting balanced surveys, however, can rarely be used directly for life cycle assessment (LCA) or environmentally...

The treatment of coproducts is one of the most persistent methodological challenges for both input-output (IO) analysis and life cycle assessment (LCA). The two fields have developed distinct modeling traditions to artificially extract independent Leontief production functions (technological “recipes”) for products of multioutput activities; wherea...

Electric vehicles (EVs) have no tailpipe emissions, but the production of their batteries leads to environmental burdens. In order to avoid problem shifting, a life cycle perspective should be applied in the environmental assessment of traction batteries. The aim of this study was to provide a transparent inventory for a lithium-ion nickel-cobalt-m...

Electric vehicles (EVs) coupled with low‐carbon electricity sources offer the potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and exposure to tailpipe emissions from personal transportation. In considering these benefits, it is important to address concerns of problem‐shifting. In addition, while many studies have focused on the use phase in compar...

Life cycle assessments (LCA) and environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) analyses both strive to account for direct and indirect environmental impacts of goods and services. Different methods have been developed to hybridize these two techniques and minimize the impact of their respective shortcomings on final assessments. These weaknesses, ho...

This study presents the life cycle assessment (LCA) of three batteries for plug-in hybrid and full performance battery electric vehicles. A transparent life cycle inventory (LCI) was compiled in a component-wise manner for nickel metal hydride (NiMH), nickel cobalt manganese lithium-ion (NCM), and iron phosphate lithium-ion (LFP) batteries. The bat...

This study presents the life cycle assessment (LCA) of three batteries for plug-in hybrid and full performance battery electric vehicles. A transparent life cycle inventory (LCI) was compiled in a component-wise manner for nickel metal hydride (NiMH), nickel cobalt manganese lithium-ion (NCM), and iron phosphate lithium-ion (LFP) batteries. The bat...