Manuele Margni

Polytechnique Montreal · Mathematical and industrial engineering

Purpose Planning a transition towards sustainable carbon neutrality at the organization level raises several accounting challenges. This paper aims to shed light on key challenges, highlight answers from current accounting standards and guidance, point out potential inconsistencies or limits, and outline potential solutions from the industrial ecol...

Purpose: Understanding the main factors affecting the environmental impacts of milk production and consumption along the value chain is key towards reducing these impacts. This paper aims to present detailed spatialized distributions of impacts associated with milk production and consumption across the United States (U.S.), accounting for locations...

Introduction and literature review Abiotic resources are extensively used in industrialized societies to deliver multiple services that contribute to human well-being. Their increased extraction and use can potentially reduce their accessibility, increase competition among users, and ultimately lead to a deficit of those services. Life cycle assess...

As climate change becomes firmly acknowledged as a financial risk, shareholders must consider corporate GHG performance to inform responsible investment decisions. To mitigate future climate risks, prospective benchmarks based on corporate climate mitigation targets are increasingly demanded by shareholders. However, existing benchmarks often lack...

Hydroelectric dams and their reservoirs have been suggested to affect freshwater biodiversity. Nevertheless, studies investigating the consequences of hydroelectric dams and reservoirs on macroinvertebrate richness have reached opposite conclusions. We performed a meta-analysis devised to elucidate the effects of hydropower, dams and reservoirs on...

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...

The concept of creating shared value was first advanced by Harvard Business School and adopted by companies to develop sustainability strategies to maximize their positive impacts on society. Eco-efficiency is a sustainability concept and a prevalent operational decision support tool that assesses the environmental performance of a system as a func...

Purpose An insufficient amount of available domestic water can lead to an increase in the occurrence of water-related diseases. No LCIA consensus has been reached on how to model the potential impacts on human health resulting from water use implying domestic water deprivation. Building on Boulay et al. (2011), this research work provides an update...

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 efficiency of sustainability assessments of textile products is generally prevented because of a lack of available and reliable data across complex and globalized supply chains. The purpose of this study is to evaluate how blockchain traceability data can improve the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of textile products and to measure the actual valu...

This research project aims to evaluate the potential reduction of environmental impacts from circular economy strategies on an industrial sector at a regional scale with a case study on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in Quebec's steel industry and its value chain. To do so, an integrated model has been created based on the matrix approach, building...

Supply chain information is invaluable to further regionalize product life cycle assessments (LCAs), but detailed information linking production and consumption centers is not always available. We introduce the commodity supply mix (CSM) defined as the trade-volume-weighted average representing the combined geographic areas for the production of a...

A novel approach is proposed to evaluate the impact of forestry on ecosystem quality in life cycle assessment (LCA) combining a naturalness assessment model with a species richness relationship. The approach is applied to a case study evaluating different forest management strategies involving concomitantly silvicultural scenarios (plantation only,...

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...

The costs to maintain Québec’s infrastructure—most of which was built in the 1960s and 1970s—are considerable, and major maintenance and reconstruction will be required in the coming years. In recent years, aluminum associations promote the increase of aluminum use in infrastructure and especially in bridge construction. This research aims to inves...

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 transformation of a river into a reservoir and the subsequent occupation of the riverbed by a reservoir can impact freshwater ecosystems and their biodiversity. We used the National Lake Assessment (134 reservoirs) and the National Rivers and Streams Assessment (2062 rivers and streams) of the United States Environmental Protection Agency in or...

Hydroelectric dams and their reservoirs have been suggested to affect freshwater biodiversity . However, studies investigating the consequences of hydroelectric dams and reservoirs on macroinvertebrate richness have reached opposite conclusions. We carried out a meta-analysis devised to elucidate the effects of hydropower dams and their reservoirs...

Hydropower is often presented as a clean, reliable, and renewable energy source, but is also recognized for its potential impacts on aquatic ecosystem biodiversity. We used direct empirical data of change in fish species richness following impoundment to develop ecological indicators to be used in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and accounting for hyd...

Although standards have identified temporary carbon storage as an important element to consider in wood product LCAs, there has been no consensus on a methodology for its accounting. This work aims to improve the accounting of carbon storage and fluxes in long-life wood products in LCA. Biogenic carbon from harvested roundwood logs were tracked usi...

PurposeConsequential life cycle assessment (C-LCA) aims to assess the environmental consequences of a decision. It differs from traditional LCA because its inventory includes all the processes affected by the decision which are identified by accounting for causal links (physical, economic, etc.). However, C-LCA results could be quite uncertain whic...

Greek yogurt (GY), a high-protein-low-fat dairy product, particularly prized for its sensory and nutritional benefits, revolutionized the North American yogurt market in less than a decade, bringing with it new sustainability challenges. Standard GY production generates large volumes of acid whey, a co-product that is a potential source of environm...

Purpose The planetary boundaries framework contains regional boundaries in addition to global boundaries. Geographically resolved methods to assess regional environmental impacts are therefore needed. Existing planetary boundaries-based life cycle assessment (PB-LCA) methods have limited geographical resolution or are not applicable to full product...

Purpose – Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) provides useful and comprehensive information on product system performance. However, it poses several challenges for decision-making process due to (i) multidimensional indicators, (ii) conflicting objectives and (iii) uncertainty associated with the performance assessment. This research propos...

The optimal use of food components in human nutrition is key to reduce the environmental burdens of the global food system. In this life cycle assessment (LCA) case study based on Greek yogurt (GY) production systems, we explore how a system boundary expansion approach (SBES), instead of an allocation approach, can help to optimize the use of the m...

Pressure-driven membrane separation processes are commonly used in cheese milk standardization. Using ultrafiltration (UF) or microfiltration (MF), membrane separation processes make it possible to concentrate the milk proteins and increase the yields of cheese vats. However, the contribution of membrane separation processes to the environmental im...

Greek yogurt (GY), a high-protein-low-fat dairy product, particularly prized for its sensory and nutritional benefits, revolutionized the North American yogurt market in less than a decade, bringing with it new sustainability challenges. The standard production of GY generates large volumes of acid whey, a co-product that is a potential source of e...

In many regions and at the planetary scale, human pressures and resulting impacts on the environment exceed levels that natural systems can sustain. These pressures are caused by networks of human activities, which often extend across countries and continents due to global trade. This has led to an increasing requirement for methods that enable abs...

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...

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...

Research Highlights: This research provides an application of a model assessing the naturalness of the forest ecosystem to demonstrate its capacity to assess either the deterioration or the rehabilitation of the ecosystem through different forest management scenarios. Background and Objectives: The model allows the assessment of the quality of ecos...

Existing methods that apply the planetary boundary for the nitrogen cycle in life cycle assessment are spatially generic and use an indicator with limited environmental relevance. Here, we develop a spatially resolved method that can quantify the impact of nitrogen emissions to air, soil, freshwater or coastal water on "safe operating space" (SOS)...

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...

Purpose Regionalization in life cycle assessment (LCA) aims to increase the representativeness of LCA results and reduce the uncertainty due to spatial variability. It may refer to adapting processes to better account for regional technological specificities (inventory regionalization) or adding of spatial information to the elementary flows (inven...

With the expected increase of the food industry activities in response to population growth, this sector must control its impacts on the environment by finding more sustainable technologies. Here, two methods for producing deacidified cranberry juice, electrodialysis with bipolar membranes (EDBM) and salt precipitation, were assessed. The aim of th...

Whether it is for water supply, flood control or hydropower uses, the transformation of a river into a reservoir can impact freshwater ecosystems and their biodiversity. Using the National Lake Assessment (NLA; 148 reservoirs) and the National Rivers and Streams Assessment (NRSA; 2121 rivers and streams) of the United States Environmental Protectio...

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...

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....

Life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to translate the planetary boundaries (PBs) concept to the scale of decisions related to products. Existing PB-LCA methods convert quantified resource use and emissions to changes in the values of PB control variables. However, the control variable for the Land-system change PB, “area of forested land remaini...

Hydroelectricity is often presented as a clean, reliable, and renewable energy source, but is also recognized for its potential impacts on aquatic ecosystem biodiversity. We used empirical data on change in fish species richness following impoundment to develop Characterisation Factors (CF) and Impact Scores (IS) for hydroelectricity production for...

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...

Food production and transformation have an increasing impact on the environment. Tools to help the agri-food industry improving its environmental performance whilst increasing the value of the products are highly needed. The present study proposes a new approach to calculate eco-efficiency that goes beyond the production costs, but accounts for the...

Research Highlights: To inform eco-designers in green building conception, we propose a conceptual model for the assessment of the impact of using wood on the quality of ecosystems. Background and Objectives: The proposed model allows the assessment of the quality of ecosystems at the landscape level based on the condition of the forest and the pro...

Purpose There is increasing interest in using fate and exposure models to spatially differentiate the impacts of chemical emissions. This work aims at exploring the operationalization in life cycle assessment (LCA) of spatially differentiated models for toxic emissions into freshwater. We analyse and compare the variability of fate and exposure fac...

Purpose Product systems use the same unit process models to represent distinct but similar activities. This notably applies to activities in cyclic dependency relationships (or “feedback loops”) that are required an infinite number of times in a product system. The study aims to test the sensitivity of uncertainty results on the assumption made con...

Eco-efficiency is a concept which aims at decoupling economic growth from resource use and pollution. The objective of this paper is to review how the application of this concept to dairy processing has evolved over time. Following the introduction of the concept, guidelines and recommendations were introduced in the dairy sector. The absence of a...

Currently, wood and wood construction materials have limitations in how carbon fluxes are accounted for in life cycle assessments. The biogenic carbon balance of wood is often considered to be neutral, meaning that the carbon sequestered by biomass through photosynthesis is considered equal to the carbon feedstock in wood that is eventually release...

Life cycle sustainability assessments (LCSA) are a comprehensive source of information on product performance to support decision-making processes toward sustainable production and consumption. Multiple criteria decision aid (MCDA) approach provides a structured decision modelling that considers the value judgments of the decision-makers and it has...

Many new damage oriented methods have recently been developed to address environmental consequences of water consumption in life cycle assessment (LCA). However, such methods can only partially be compared and combined, since their modelling structure and metrics are inconsistent. Moreover, they focus on specific water sources (e.g. river) and miss...

Purpose Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been used to assess freshwater-related impacts according to a new water footprint framework formalized in the ISO 14046 standard. To date, no consensus-based approach exists for applying this standard and results are not always comparable when different scarcity or stress indicators are used for characterizat...

PurposeIn social life cycle assessment (SLCA), to measure the social performance, it is necessary to consider the subcategory indicators related to each stakeholder dimension, such as workers, local community, society, consumers and value chain participants. Current methods in SLCA scientific literature consider a standard arbitrary linear score se...

Addressing the spatial dimension in life cycle assessment (LCA) appears to be a promising avenue to reduce the uncertainty of LCA results. However, to our knowledge, there is no comprehensive literature review on how to integrate geographic aspects at every LCA stage. This study aims to create a common language and build a framework guiding the LCA...

The increased demand for food production to nourish the rapidly growing human population raises serious sustainability issues for the food sector. Indeed, conventional food production lines involve processes having significant environmental burden. Hence, the present study aims to demonstrate an environmentally sustainable way of food production. T...

New technologies such as 3D printing, also known as rapid manufacturing or additive manufacturing, are promising technologies to support the aeronautics sector moving toward its ambitious environmental goals. An eco-efficiency method combining life cycle costs and life cycle environmental assessment is developed to support eco-design initiatives in...