Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: development of a new method to integrate particular matter formation in climate change impact assessment

The concept of sustainability is nowadays one of the principal points for choices about global development and takes into account environmental, economic and social aspects. It is now shared between all stakeholders that the right approach for products and services sustainability analysis must considered the entire life cycle, to individuate all phases and processes that are impactful and so to manage the improvement in the most efficient and effective way, with no risks to forget aspects that could be relevant for the results assessment. For the life cycle assessment some techniques are internationally recognized, between them the more developed is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for the environmental studies. For the social aspects and, even more, for the sustainability assessment the published methods are different and have some methodological limits not yet solved. Today the research field on LCSA (Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment) is differentiated on some aspects, from the definition of a methodology that consider together environmental, economic and social aspects, to the choice of adequate sets of assessment indicators. The present research focuses on an improvement proposal of an existing characterization method that allows to assess damage to Human Health (social characteristic), that actually do not take into account consequences of the respiratory problems due to the average temperature increase as a climate change phenomena (environmental characteristic). The research activities were carried out at CESQA (Environmental and Quality Research Centre) of the Department of Industrial Engineering (Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale – DII) at the University of Padova (Italy). The results of the research activities are summarized in five chapters. Chapter 1: includes a general introduction on the concept of sustainability and on the recent Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment methodology, underlined actual developments and limits. Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), life cycle methodologies for environmental and social aspects evaluation of products and services are analyzed. It has been underlined how the most know and recent published characterization methods for LCA allow to evaluate the human health damage category: this could be considered an indicator of social type because for the calculation of DALY (disability-adjusted life years, quantifying the burden of disease from mortality and morbidity). From methods analysis arise that characterization methods have also some limits about the human health damage evaluation: they don’t take into account, for example, consequences of respiratory problems due to climate change and in particular way from average global temperature, that affects dangerous particles concentration in inhaled air(for example particulate matters). Chapter 2: reports on materials and methods used in the present research, from the general model description for the damage assessment to the specific model that has been proposed to integrate effects on human health due to the variation of inhalable substance in the air from temperature rise global phenomena. Chapter 3: presents the results of the research testing model applicability on four different specific case studies, in which has been implemented a life cycle analysis through the application of ReCiPe 2008 assessment method and the method proposed in the present research; difference on results have been evaluated. Sensitivity analysis results have been also reported, considering as variation parameter different values of temperature increase. Chapter 4: presents the discussions on results and an analysis of results evaluating differences between ReCiPe 2008 method and the proposed one. Results of sensitivity analysis are discussed and deepened. Chapter 5: reports on the conclusions and perspectives for future researches