25 examples of research with impact: Life Cycle Assessment – environmental assessment of materials, products, technologies and policies

As the FNR marks 25 years since its creation, we highlight 25 examples of FNR-supported research with impact. Since 2006, Enrico Benetto has led research that plays an important role in preventing greenwashing and enabling responsible decisions on the adoption of policies, on the consumption of products, and on the development of technologies that may trigger significant environmental impacts: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the development of computer models, indicators and metrics for the environmental assessment of materials, products, technologies and policies.

From cradle to cradle to grave: LCA evaluates environmental impacts

The objective of LCA is to evaluate the environmental impacts generated by, for example, a product, over its life cycle – from cradle to grave including reuse and recycling patterns – while considering the different environmental problems, such as looking at ecosystems damages rather than just focussing on climate change.

One area the research field aims to support is the ecodesign and environmental optimisation of products and technologies – from complex products like for example and electric cars to simpler artefacts, like e.g. packaging. It also helps to assess the overall benefits and impacts a product will generate at market and societal level, in relation to policies or consumption patterns, such as the global environmental benefits from the deployment of electric mobility because of specific policies or market uptake.

Climobil – a publicly available tool to help consumers choose vehicles

The research of Enrico Benetto’s group provides science-based indicators and recommendations, informing and influencing the decision making of industry, policy makers and consumers on consumption and production patterns. The impact, while difficult to quantify, has the potential for broad and diverse impacts.

“It is fair to say that our research has impacted the LCA research field and more recently the broader scientific and stakeholders’ community.”

The project CONNECTING featured a premiere: It was the first time researchers connected an agent-based model to LCA to model the environmental impacts associated with electromobility scenarios, for the specific case of Luxembourg.

“Apart from the methodological novelty, the project anticipated the non-fulfilment of the mobility policy targets set for the horizon 2020, and identified the causes and levers for improvement. Also, it led to a follow up project (HERMES, with the company ENGIE) on H2 mobility and eventually to a calculator for the general public – ‘Climobil’ “.

The publicly available online tool “Climobil” (https://climobil.lu/) gives users science-based comparisons of the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions in g CO2 eq./vehicle-km from passenger cars, namely diesel or petrol vs. battery-electric. The tool’s aim is to help environmental conscious consumers to make an informed choice of which vehicle to buy.

“The tool has gained in popularity, increasing the international exposure of LIST and offering the opportunity to collect significant feedback on various ways to improve the calculator. As an example, only in the period going from 1 January 2021 to 10 September 2021, Climobil users came from 5 different continents (Europe 77.73%, Americas 15.10%, Asia 4.14%, Oceania 2.10% and Africa 0.85%) totalling more than 10,600 visitors.”

LCA for funds and bonds

Finally, another example of high-impact project is REFUND, where LCA was adapted to assess the environmental and social impacts of equity funds and bonds. This work was also referenced in the last IPCC report, reaching global exposure. The project shed light on the sustainability of green and sustainable labelled funds.

“The REFUND LCA model was applied to a sample of 1340 sustainable (SRI – sustainable responsible investment) and conventional equity funds domiciled in Europe and their 11,275 unique holdings. We extended our application to a case study of funds self-classified as Article 8 and Article 9 funds under the recent European Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). The model estimated life cycle emissions for 94% of the companies held – compared to 17% coverage in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).”

“When including scope 3, i.e. lifecycle emissions, the exposure to GHG emissions of both SRI and conventional funds is two to three times larger than when considering only direct impacts from holdings’ operations.”

Benetto explains that 24% of the sampled Europe-domiciled SRI funds are more exposed to life cycle carbon emissions than the ETF tracking the conventional market index MSCI Europe. These results prove that the actual impacts of SRI labelled funds do not necessarily reflect the highest environmental standards people may expect.

In the same project, the team proposed 13 environmental and 13 social life-cycle-based, ready-to-use, and policy-relevant impact indicators, aligned primarily with the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) for investment funds. The team estimated the impacts of a sample of 230 self-labelled sustainable investment funds for all indicators: the total estimated environmental impacts and social impacts are large, varying between 2.1 and 28.4 times the impacts associated with the consumption of one million EU citizens, depending on the indicator.