The use of life cycle assessment as an early R&D decision tool: bottlenecks and potential solutions

At an ever increasing rate innovative chemistry and technology platforms are reshaping manufacturing environments to become factories of the future as being more productive, lean and flexible. The use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in early process development phases has been challenged many times to assess whether or not this willingness to strive for innovation is an environmentally sustainable one. This paper provides general solutions to two major bottlenecks in applying LCA in R&D decision trees; (1) the lack of sufficient process data in early development phases and (2) the lack of knowledge on the effect of scale and learning on the environmental sustainability of a chemical product or process. The first issue is tackled with the use of multiple linear regression modeling, while for the second bottleneck the concept of deriving experience curves is proposed and illustrated. While this paper has taken a step in the direction of including LCA as a decision making tool in early process development phases, it stresses that more research should be conducted especially on Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM), since it makes little sense to optimize in-house production without a proper procurement and Supply Chain Management (SCM)