Philippe Loubet

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux

With global lithium-ion battery (LIB) production on the rise, production scraps — constituting 5 to 30 wt.% of total manufacturing output — are expected to remain a major waste stream until at least 2030. These scraps present a significant recycling challenge, necessitating effective and sustainable solutions. In this study, we conduct a life cycle...

Life cycle assessment, a comprehensive tool to evaluate environmental impacts across a product's life cycle, traditionally focuses on "inside-out" impacts caused by the product on the environment, emphasizing resource use, global warming, and other environmental impacts. In contrast, the "outside-in" perspective considers resource availability and...

The growing demand and production of lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) have led to a critical concern regarding their resources and end‐of‐life management. Consequently, LIB recycling has emerged as a prominent topic in academia and in industries, driven by new worldwide governmental regulations and the increasing gap between the supply and demand of cr...

This paper presents a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a low-power capacity Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) system supplying a building on Bordeaux INP's university campus, powered by the French low-carbon electricity mix. It compares environmental impacts with alternative thermal energy supply solutions, analyzing various scenarios including d...

By 2050, food production's environmental impacts are projected to double without intervention. Crucial changes in dietary habits are needed, and seafood can be pivotal. The focus in calculating burdens using life cycle assessment (LCA) indicators has shifted towards exploring interconnections within the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus. Addressing thi...

As the global imperative for decarbonization gains momentum, the need for action in chemistry laboratories becomes increasingly apparent. This study examines the 2019 carbon footprint of three French chemistry laboratories...

As the global imperative for decarbonization gains momentum, the need for action in chemistry laboratories becomes increasingly apparent. This study examines the 2019 carbon footprint of three French chemistry laboratories encompassing energy, purchases, travels, and commutes. The average per capita carbon footprint stands at 5.6 teqCO2/year, posit...

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 Information and communications technology (ICT) plays a key role in higher education in improving the teaching process. Consequently, the environmental impacts associated with ICT are increasing, and innovative solutions must be deployed to reduce these impacts and increase students’ awareness. Single-board computers (SBCs) are promising be...

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...

The consumption of most metals continues to rise following ever-increasing population growth, affluence and technological development. Sustainability considerations urge greater resource efficiency and retention of metals in the economy. We model the fate of a yearly cohort of 61 extracted metals over time and identify where losses are expected to...

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...

Purpose Common octopus is the fishing species with highest economic revenue in Portugal, and its consumption per capita is very high. The majority of catches come from the small-scale fleet with pots and traps. The aims were to assess main environmental impacts of common octopus’ fishery with traps and pots in the Algarve region, where the most imp...

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...

Oat is mainly produced in northern latitude countries such as Canada, which is world's second largest producer. Hence it is necessary to study the environmental impacts of alternative farming systems to conventional oat production in order to improve its environmental performance. A life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted to compare the environme...

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...

After the rare earth element (REE) crisis in 2011, companies invested in new supply routes of REEs, such as the recycling from end-of-life fluorescent lamps. Although recycling is in the current market situation not economically profitable anymore, it does fit in a strategy towards a low-carbon and a circular economy, for example to mitigate the su...

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...

Modeling the use or the supply of recycled materials in a product-oriented Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is challenging and a step in LCA that is typically associated with diverging practices and outcomes. In the ambition to harmonize LCA practices and increase the comparability of studies, the European Commission published the Product Environmental...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Ressource dissipation Space debris Atmospheric reentry

The space sector is a new area of development for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies. However, it deals with strong particularities which complicate the use of LCA. One of the most important is that the space industry is the only human activity crossing all stages of the atmosphere during the launch event or the atmospheric re-entry. As a result,...

Production of alkyl polyglycosides (APGs) from mechanocatalytic depolymerization of wheat straw is a promising route because of the use of an available bio-based feedstock. This study aims to verify the environmental benefit of this process in comparison with a reference process that produces APGs from corn starch based glucose. Life cycle assessme...

The built environment is recognized as a major hotspot of resource use and environmental impacts. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been increasingly used to assess the environmental impacts of construction products and buildings and a new trend is characterized by the application of LCA to larger systems such as neighborhoods during early design pha...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been identified by actors of the space industry as the most adequate tool in order to measure the environmental impact of space missions. Nevertheless, the scope of the current studies adopts a " cradle to launch pad " approach and does not take into account the end-of-life disposal of the spacecraft. With an expecte...

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 spacecrafts. Today, space debris is a significant and constant danger to all space missions. Consequently, it becomes compelled to design new space missions considering End-of-Life requirem...

Purpose Multifunctionality in LCA can be solved by several allocation procedures. Various official guidelines give divergent recommendations in which allocation procedure to apply, and up to now, no consensus has been reached. We aim to identify the obstacles to a consistent allocation approach that can be applied to all product categories and is s...

Purpose Multifunctionality in life-cycle assessment (LCA) is solved with allocation, for which many different procedures are available. Lack of sufficient guidance and difficulties to identify the correct allocation approach cause a large number of combinations of methods to exist in scientific literature. This paper reviews allocation procedures f...

A framework and an associated modeling tool to perform life cycle assessment (LCA) of urban water system, namely the WaLA model, has been recently developed. In this paper, the WaLA model is applied to a real case study: the urban water system of the Paris suburban area, in France. It aims to verify the capacity of the model to provide environmenta...

The emphasis on the sustainable urban water management has increased over the last decades. In this context decision makers need tools to measure and improve the environmental performance of urban water systems (UWS) and their related scenarios. In this paper, we propose a versatile model, named WaLA (Water system Life cycle Assessment), which redu...

The built environment is recognized as a major hotspot of resource use and environmental impacts. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been increasingly used to assess the environmental impacts of construction products and buildings during the last 25 years. A new trend stems in the application of LCA to larger systems such as urban islets or neighborho...

a b s t r a c t Water is a growing concern in cities, and its sustainable management is very complex. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been increasingly used to assess the environmental impacts of water technologies during the last 20 years. This review aims at compiling all LCA papers related to water technologies, out of which 18 LCA studies deals...

Environmental impact assessment models are readily available for the assessment of pollution-related impacts in life cycle assessment (LCA). These models have led to an increased focus on water pollution issues resulting in numerous LCA studies. Recently, there have been significant developments in methods assessing freshwater use. These improvemen...

To improve water management at the scale of large cities is a real challenge. However, the quantification of flows and environmental impacts linked to water use are not yet sufficiently developed. This is the objective of the thesis: “how to model complex urban water system of a megacity for assessing its environmental impacts in relation to the pr...

Physical water deprivation at the midpoint level is assessed in water-related LCIA methods using water scarcity indicators (e.g., withdrawal-to-availability and consumption-to-availability) at the river basin scale. Although these indicators represent a great step forward in the assessment of water-use-related impacts in LCA, significant challenges...