Accounting for abiotic resources dissipation and biotic resources
Depletion is the concept underpinning one of the most widely applied approach to account for the impacts associated with mineral and metal resource use in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) step. Once a resource is extracted from the Earth’s crust, it is considered depleted.
During the Environmental Footprint (EF) pilot phase (2013-2018), the concept of resources (or materials) dissipation after their use in the technosphere has been increasingly called for being considered as a potential better way to account for (abiotic) resources in an EF context. The international community has started investigating further the concept of resource dissipation applied to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and, still, there is currently no common understanding of what a dissipative flow is, if this has implications on how to define the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) of a process, nor there is an accepted LCIA model to be applied to dissipative flows.
This report provides a literature review of existing studies in different disciplines regarding resource dissipation. Furthermore, it provides an approach on how to deal with resource dissipation at the LCI and LCIA levels. The proposed approaches were tested in case studies.
Moreover, the report addresses another aspects so far not properly developed in LCIA: the impact associated to the use of naturally occurring biotic resources and a proposal for the characterization thereof.
BEYLOT Antoine;
ARDENTE Fulvio;
PENEDO DE SOUSA MARQUES Alexandra;
MATHIEUX Fabrice;
PANT Rana;
SALA Serenella;
ZAMPORI Luca;
2020-06-22
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC120170
978-92-76-17227-7 (online),
978-92-76-17228-4 (print),
1831-9424 (online),
1018-5593 (print),
EUR 30126 EN,
OP KJ-NA-30126-EN-N (online),
OP KJ-NA-30126-EN-C (print),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC120170,
10.2760/232839 (online),
10.2760/815673 (print),
