A price-based life cycle impact assessment method to quantify the reduced accessibility to mineral resources value

Several methods were developed to quantify the damage to mineral resources in LCA. Building on these and further expanding the concept of how to assess mineral resources in LCA, the authors developed in previous articles a method to account for dissipative resource flows in life cycle inventory (LCI). This article presents a price-based life cycle impact assessment method to quantify the potential impact of dissipative uses of resources. This article firstly defines an impact pathway from resource use to resource dissipation and subsequent damage to the safeguard subject for “mineral resources”. It explores the quantification of this damage through the definition of characterization factors (CFs), for application to dissipative flows reported in LCI datasets. Market prices are used as a relevant proxy for the multiple, complex and varied functions and values held by mineral resources. Price data are collected considering a 50-year timeframe. Intervals of 10, 15, 20 and 30 years are considered for sensitivity analysis. Price-based CFs are tested on one cradle-to-gate case-study (copper production), in combination with accounted resources dissipated across the life-cycle. An approach to calculate the normalization factor (NF) is explored at the EU level.

ARDENTE Fulvio;  BEYLOT Antoine;  ZAMPORI Luca; 

2023-01-16

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG

JRC129663

0948-3349 (online),   

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-022-02102-4,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC129663,   

10.1007/s11367-022-02102-4 (online),