Michael Zwicky Hauschild

Technical University of Denmark | DTU · Department of Environmental and Resource Engineering

While Circular Economy (CE) is promoted as a resource-optimizing strategy, there is a need to ensure a clear and mutual understanding of the goals of CE and the indicators to measure progress. This requires access to assessment tools and methods based on a shared understanding of resources. Through life cycle assessment, the carbon-energy-material...

The fraction of materials that does not reach the target product in discrete manufacturing is very significant. Directing secondary material streams towards other manufacturing processes, possibly after intermediate pre-processing, offers opportunities for more energy and resource efficient recycling routes. This paper contributes to the exploratio...

Ecotoxicological impacts of chemicals released into the environment are characterized by combining fate, exposure, and effects. For characterizing effects, species sensitivity distributions (SSDs) estimate toxic pressures of chemicals as the potentially affected fraction of species. Life cycle assessment (LCA) uses SSDs to identify products with lo...

Green hydrogen is increasingly regarded as a pivotal solution in achieving “net zero by 2050” in carbon neutrality across various sectors and industries. Ambitious decarbonisation roadmaps largely depend on the successful deployment of electrolysis technologies. Among these, Proton Exchange Membrane Electrolysis (PEMEL) stands out for its efficienc...

Purpose Nitrogen emissions from human activities are contributing to elevated levels of eutrophication in coastal ecosystems. Mechanisms involved in marine eutrophication show strong geographical variation. Existing life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) and absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) methods for marine eutrophication do n...

Advanced technologies are inherently dependent on critical minerals and their related metals. The mining extraction of these critical minerals leads to significant social and environmental impacts that extend beyond the regions where those advanced technologies are ultimately used. This study explores the global socio-environmental challenges arisi...

With the growing urgency of addressing climate change it is increasingly important that decision makers at all levels are equipped to take efficient mitigation actions. This research evaluates the potential of four mitigation strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the building stock based on a case study, and these are further evaluated...

With a reported insufficient progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), improving knowledge on the uptake and use of SDGs within the private sector is imperative. To address this need, we examine the SDG reporting characteristics of 8500 companies using a global business and governance database. Our results show no correlat...

In Press/Preprint This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review. It is currently undergoing copyediting and typesetting. Although final publication galleys will be added at a later stage, the article is fully citable using the DOI number. This scoping review examines environmental impacts related to food production a...

Steel production is a difficult-to-mitigate sector that challenges climate mitigation commitments. Efforts for future decarbonization can benefit from understanding its progress to date. Here we report on greenhouse gas emissions from global steel production over the past century (1900-2015) by combining material flow analysis and life cycle assess...

Packaging is lately identified as one of the biggest environmental problems and is at a focus of the scientific community and the industry aiming at minimizing environmental impacts. One of the most applied eco-design measures is to substitute traditional packaging materials with bio-based materials. One of the driving incentives for the packaging...

Bridging applied ecology and ecotoxicology is key to protect ecosystems. These disciplines show a mismatch, especially when evaluating pressures. Contrasting to applied ecology, ecotoxicological impacts are often characterized for whole species assemblages based on Species Sensitivity Distributions (SSDs). SSDs are statistical models describing per...

Assessing the prospective climate preservation potential of novel, innovative, but immature chemical production techniques is limited by the high number of process synthesis options and the lack of reliable, high-throughput quantitative sustainability pre-screening methods. This study presents the sequential use of data-driven hybrid prediction (AN...

Purpose Extensive agriculture activities for crop production have led to increasing environmental impacts that threaten to exceed environmentally safe limits. The purpose of this study is to analyze resource efficiency of the agri-food industry, considering the case of sugarcane production in Pakistan. Methods A holistic approach has been applied...

The historical consumption of natural resources to fulfil the demands of the growing population have resulted in severe environmental degradation. Therefore, understanding the role of fulfilment of human needs and the social aspect of sustainability is crucial in the transition towards more sustainable societies. We present a methodological framewo...

Absolute environmental sustainability assessments (AESAs) evaluate whether the environmental impact of a product system is within its share of a safe operating space as determined by biophysical sustainability limits such as the planetary boundaries (PBs). The choice of sharing principle has significant influence on the result of an AESA, and any s...

The industry sector has high carbon emissions with a large contribution stemming from metals manufacturing. There is an increasing interest in additive manufacturing (AM) as a manufacturing technique for lean manufacturing and circular economy (CE), but can it become environmentally sustainable?We propose a holistic framework to investigate future...

Our current use of plastics is the epitome of an unsustainable lifestyle with their reliance on fossil resources and their widespread application through single use products that, after use, end up in the natural environment. A study now analyses what it would take for plastics to become a sustainable material.

Balancing human communities' and ecosystems' need for freshwater is one of the major challenges of the 21st century as population growth and improved living conditions put increasing pressure on freshwater resources. While frameworks to assess the environmental impacts of freshwater consumption have been proposed at the regional scale, an operation...

Several water footprint indicators have been developed to curb freshwater stress. Volumetric footprints support water allocation decisions and strive to increase water productivity in all sectors. In contrast, impact-oriented footprints are used to minimize the impacts of water use on human health, ecosystems, and freshwater resources. Efforts to c...

Decisions about the development of new marketed technologies or products invariably come with consequences for economy, society and the environment. Environmental and health risk assessment on the one hand and sustainability assessment on the other hand are tools that offer different but complementary information about such consequences. Conflicts...

Freshwater ecosystems provide major benefits to human wellbeing—so-called ecosystem services (ES)—but are currently threatened among others by ecotoxicological pressure from chemicals reaching the environment. There is an increased motivation to incorporate ES in quantification tools that support decision-making, such as life cycle assessment (LCA)...

Fermentable sugars are an attractive feedstock for production of bio‐based chemicals. However, little is known about the environmental performance of sugar feedstocks when demand for sugars increases, and when local conditions and sensitivities of receiving ecosystems are taken into account. Production of monosaccharides from various first‐ and sec...

Life cycle engineering of new products and technologies must consider not just the single product and product life cycle, but also the foreseeable growth in market volume that results from increases in population and affluence, in order to allow the associated total environmental impact to be taken into account during the product development. The e...

Chemicals emitted to the environment affect ecosystem health from local to global scale, and reducing chemical impacts has become an important element of European and global sustainability efforts. The present work advances ecotoxicity characterization of chemicals in life cycle impact assessment by proposing recommendations resulting from internat...

With long-term prospects indicating worldwide increasing urbanization over the next decades, cities are responsible for a growing share of global greenhouse gas emissions. This makes local policies more important in mitigating climate change, and calls for efficient tools allowing local decision makers to measure the impact of urban areas under the...

Purpose The multiple climate tipping points potential (MCTP) is a novel metric in life-cycle assessment (LCA). It addresses the contribution of greenhouse gas emissions to disturb those processes in the Earth system, which could pass a tipping point and thereby trigger large, abrupt and potentially irreversible changes. The MCTP, however, does not...

The irreversible impacts of human activities on the Earth have led to the introduction of planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity to act within. Subsequently, Science-Based Targets (SBTs) have been set for companies as Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets consistent with the required decarbonisation level to...

The global society faces an existential threat if it fails to meet current and future material needs of its populations, while staying within the carrying capacity of our planet. An approach that has been put forwards to address this complex challenge is to aim to close our society's material flows through introduction of a Circular Economy (CE). T...

Marine eutrophication and hypoxia caused by excess nutrient availability is a growing environmental problem. In this study, we explore marine nitrogen enrichment in the context of Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment (AESA), a method combining life cycle assessment (LCA) with environmental boundaries aiming to compare environmental impa...

Aircraft engine manufacturers have been reported to cause great environmental impacts within the aircraft manufacturing industry, with a large contribution stemming from the integrated bladed rotors due to special manufacturing requirements. Here we assess all relevant life cycle environmental impacts of manufacturing a Ti–6Al–4 V alloy rotor and i...

Chemicals are widely used in modern society, which can lead to negative impacts on ecosystems. Despite the urgent relevance for global policy setting, there are no established methods to assess the absolute sustainability of chemical pressure at relevant spatiotemporal scales. We propose an absolute environmental sustainability framework (AESA) for...

Additive manufacturing was initially employed to create models and to prototype parts that engineers had envisioned in shorter times to provide enhanced product design flexibility. Currently, it is fully accessible to different industrial sectors. In particular, it has the potentials to be employed in the metal sector, which is a significant contri...

We submit that the safe operating space of the planetary boundary of novel entities is exceeded since annual production and releases are increasing at a pace that outstrips the global capacity for assessment and monitoring. The novel entities boundary in the planetary boundaries framework refers to entities that are novel in a geological sense and...

Several water footprint indicators have been developed to curb freshwater stress. Volumetric footprints support water allocation decisions and strive to increase water productivity in all sectors. In contrast, impact-oriented footprints focus on minimizing the impacts of water use on human health, ecosystems, and freshwater resources. Efforts to co...

Environmental dissipation is a novel approach to account for impacts from mineral resources. In contrast to all other resource‐related life cycle impact assessment methods, which use data on extractions as input to calculation of indicator scores, environmental dissipation is characterized solely through emissions to the environment. Making environ...

To address global food demand and sustainability challenges, aquaculture has appeared as an essential element in food systems, and an increasing number of national aquaculture policies have emerged over the past decades. However, several of these policies have failed because of an often-argued inability to anticipate their far-reaching implications...

Nutrient depletion in Tanzanian sisal production has led to yield decreases over time. We use nutrient mass balances embedded within a life cycle assessment to quantify the extent of nutrient depletion for different production systems, and then used circular economy principles to identify potential cosubstrates from within the Tanzanian economy to...

Nutrient depletion in Tanzanian sisal production has led to yield decreases over time. We use nutrient mass balances embedded within a life cycle assessment to quantify the extent of nutrient depletion for different production systems, then used circular economy principles to identify potential cosubstrates from within the Tanzanian economy to anae...

Purpose Machine tools are the equipment used for the cutting and shaping of materials, like metals, which generate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across their life cycles due to material use and energy consumption. The life cycle emissions of machine tools are distributed over time and may vary with technology advancement. This paper aims to incorp...

Water-based manufacturing processes are under development for greener manufacturing of lithium ion batteries but their environmental impacts are unclear with new introduced materials and a large consumption of deionized water. We report a life cycle assessment (LCA) study on the water-based manufacturing of the most popular NMC-graphite battery pac...

Steel production is a difficult-to-mitigate sector that challenges climate mitigation commitments. Efforts for future decarbonization can benefit from understanding its progress to date. Here we report on greenhouse gas emissions from global steel production over the past century (1900-2015) by combining material flow analysis and life cycle assess...

The aeronautics sector has been regarded as an important contributor to environmental problems, due to aircraft fuel consumption and combustion emissions. Little is known about the other parts of the value chain, in particular the aircraft manufacturing. The complexity of aircraft systems and the lack of public data have prevented analysis of disag...

Mounting evidence indicates that climate tipping points can have large, potentially irreversible, impacts on the earth system and human societies. Yet, climate change metrics applied in current sustainability assessment methods generally do not consider these tipping points, with the use of arbitrarily determined time horizons and assumptions that...

Science-based-targets (SBTs) have been introduced to guide companies to reduce their Greenhouse Gas emissions in line with the level of decarbonization required to keep average global atmospheric temperature increase well below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels. SBTs seeks to decouple economic growth and emissions to achieve the greenhouse gas...

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...

In order to make the sustainable development of transport system, China has taken actions toward the electrification transition of vehicles. However, whether the electric vehicles (EVs) are more environmentally friendly than the conventional internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) in China is still not clear due to a lack of complete and consis...

To assess terrestrial ecosystems damages from acidification, life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) can be applied using characterisation factors, which integrate the quantification of adverse effects via effect factors (EFs), linking decreasing soil pH to declines in species richness. With a species coverage of 0.6%, the currently-existing EFs define...

Increasing environmental pressure from production and consumption of products and services is starting to affect Earth System stability. Thus, the Planetary Boundaries framework introduced a set of absolute boundaries for keeping the Earth System stable and delimiting a safe operating space for humanity. The sum of environmental pressures associate...

Environmental sustainability boundaries can help us navigate a sustainable development trajectory, by evaluating environmental performance of current actions in relation to such boundaries. However, current definitions of environmental sustainability boundaries have shortcomings when used in environmental assessments. The shortcomings include consi...

In the light of increasing human pressures on the Earth system, the issue of sharing in the face of scarcity is more pressing than ever. The planetary boundary framework identifies and quantifies nine environmental boundaries and corresponding human pressures. However, when aiming to make the concept operational for decision support it is unclear h...

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 global society faces huge challenges to meet the expanding needs of a growing population within the constraints posed by a climate crisis and a strongly accelerated loss of biodiversity. For sustainability, the total environmental impact of our activities must respect the planetary boundaries that define what is a safe operating space for our c...

The eco-efficiency of actual production processes is still one dominating research area in engineering. However, neglecting the environmental impacts of production equipment, technical building services and energy supply might lead to sub-optimization or burden-shifting and thus reduced effectiveness. As an established method used in sustainability...

It is unknown whether metallic elements remain important contributors to terrestrial ecotoxicity impact scores in life cycle assessment (LCA) when solid- and liquid-phase speciation are considered in environmental fate, exposure and effects. Here, a new speciation-based method for calculating comparative toxicity potentials (CTP) of 23 metallic ele...

The safe operating space as defined by the Planetary Boundaries framework can be used as an environmental sustainability reference in absolute environmental sustainability assessments (AESAs). In AESAs, the safe operating space must be distributed among human activities so impacts associated with an activity can be related to its assigned share of...

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...

Producing biochemicals from renewable resources is a key driver for moving towards sustainable societies. Life c