Hello and welcome to the last lecture in the sixth lecture of this series in the module
risk assessment and life cycle analysis in the course on ecology and environment.
So the last lecture, the lecture 5 we ended with asking the question if there is a formal
method for doing the analysis of a product or process in an organized manner and life
cycle analysis is the method for doing that.
LCA or Life Cycle Analysis is essentially a cradle-to-grave analysis of a product or
a process.
So we would like to do a systematic analysis to assess the risk of a process or a material
throughout its lifetime.
So it is not just during its manufacturing process we see that in processes preceding
the product and after its life time or during its usage we would like to see what's going
on and track it.
It is part of the International Standard Organization and ISO guidelines for LCA or ISO 1440 or
14044 and these keep changing over a period of time.
So one has to review this occasionally too.
So LCA can be performed to assess the impact of a product.
For example impact of setting up a power plant in a particular location.
The power plant is a product, is a is in some sense a product or any other component that
you are looking for.
To assess the impact of a process so impact of using a thermal process in a power plant,
so the power plant itself is an entity in the first part the product is an entity that
we don't really care how it is doing.
It's a product that's it.
The power plant.
It's a thermal power plant that is one issue.
Second is what kind of process is being used in the power plant.
We can use different processes such as a thermal process or a nuclear process and these are
debatable things at which one causes more damage and in long run or short run in the
case of an accident and so on.
So you can also compare to the impacts of two different products for the processes example
comparison of thermal versus nuclear to produce power.
So this kind of analysis can be done in a systematic manner in order to produce, in
order to give results and data that people can use in order to formulate policy.
So LCA can also be performed with different objectives.
So this is a very wide scope for LCA and as you can see here we can do an LCA for environmental
impact which is the objective what I will be talking about and we have been discussing
for the last six lectures but LCA can also be performed for economic impacts or social
impact.
For example, starting a particular industry can reduce employment opportunities for a
particular group of people that's both social and economic and it can change for example
changing the import-export policy can change the economic environment in a country and
so on.
So these are rather life cycle assessments that can be done.
So economic and social impacts are very closely linked and the environmental impacts is what
we are going to be discussing primary but it can be done with other objectives as well.
So let's look at a simple example of LCA to set everything in perspective so that is easy
for us to understand.
These are very general example.
One does not need to know the details of this process except from very crude.
So paper manufacturing the source of the raw material it comes from forest.
So forest of trees, paper made from wood, trees, wood pulp.
So we need forest for that.
Those are the raw materials.
From the forest we take wood.
We harvest wood and we process the wood and we manufacture the pulp.
The pulp is extracted from the world and this is a chemically intensive process because
the wood is made with different components and the pulp that is used for paper manufacture
is one component of the wood and it to be removed chemically and that's a very chemically
intensive process and one of the original chemical very intensive chemical processes
that started and then we manufacture paper.
From the pulp paper is manufactured in different grades by adding other additives and purifying
it further and paper manufacture and printing is done on paper.
Paper can also be used as it is but people write.
So printing can be seen as both either you write with a pen that is printing as well
or printing with in a printing press and then it goes to distribution and then end-user
and then once end-user is done with a paper product.
So we all see that in our lifetime we have used a lot of paper and we have thrown it
and so where do we throw it?
When we throw it some of it goes recycles goes back to the pulp in the wood processing
plant and they extract again and get the useful components again and the rest of it goes to
waste disposal.
So the waste disposal either ends up in a dumpster or a landfill or gets burnt or something
like that incinerated some other thing.
So this is your main cycle of this paper manufacture.
However, if you notice there are a few other secondary cycles here.
The first one is the forest itself, a very specific type of wood may be required for
specific types of paper and so and this is a big - and this has occurred in other processes
as well.
So in order to have a particular product you need to have a particular kind of raw material
and that raw material is not available one grows this raw material.
So for example if you want to have paper of a certain kind if that - if the wood that
is naturally occurring in the area is not present then one would plant trees of that
kind and then change the ecology of the system.
So there is an ecological impact here if you're in a forest we have all mango trees and you
cut on all the mango trees and put some other trees that are useful for paper manufacture
then your original ecology of the system is destroyed along with the mango trees the other
things, there are several other things that will disappear and there's a new ecosystem
is formed and we don't know what is the impact of all that.
So that is a change in the ecological pattern.
Second thing is as we see here this in the pulp manufacture you have as I mentioned it's
chemically intensive process so which means there is a lot of chemical that are used in
this which are produced just for paper manufacture, pulp manufacturing and as a result of this
there is some waste chemicals that are released and you have to talk about their disposal,
the waste disposal of those particular kind of chemicals and then you have another set
where you are printing, so if you are just writing even if you are writing on paper you
have ink, and an ink is a chemical and that's manufactured from somewhere and there is a
set of industries that do whatever it is necessary to manufacture the ink and other inks when
we talk about ink we're talking about printing toners, we talk about those kind of any ink
printing inks and there is an entire cycle.
So if I can take the production of this chemical ink as a separate life cycle white foam but
this is all part of the paper manufacture and sometimes these kind of industries come
in close proximity to paper manufacturing industry because they supply their main end-user
is the paper manufacturer and then we have the waste disposal of that also.
So then we have of course we have distribution.
We have transportation cost.
So typically the forests - there is transportation cost involved in the forests to this thing
but if you notice paper manufacturing facilities along in the world they are located near forest,
raw material is nearby and therefore the pulp is manufacturer and papers manufactures are
all nearby but then the end user need not be nearby.
End user is usually far away paper that is printed somewhere and it is used somewhere
else.
So there is distribution and transport and the end user may be very far away okay.
So we have a set of impacts that can occur and we have - I have again broken this up
into different categories here.
So we at look at resource generation and management.
This is the first thing is it's the case of a forest we have a modification we call it
the we have land-use change what we call a land-use is land is used for certain things.
Land can be just waste land.
It can be a forest natural forest.
When we clear natural for us to make a plantation we are altering the ecology of that system
and for example we clear the forest and make a building there, we are also altering the
ecology.
So these are all examples of the same thing.
So if you want to make a large factory you clear a large section of forests and therefore
or an apartment complex you can clear large amounts of forest and make.
What is the impact of that?
To a lot of things, they can be impacts to ground water flow.
There can be impacts to climate temperature and all that.
So these are all the impact that can happen and then of course there is energy consumption
in all of this and introduction of foreign entities.
This is a big problem.
So when we talk about ecology we do talk about introduction of foreign plants and along with
it whether in the longer and this is good or bad needs to be evaluated and sometimes
it's difficult to predict sometimes it's a question that one cannot answer but it can
have serious repercussions to the way.
So it's not an easy question to answer and there is no straightforward solution to this
and it has to be seen in the context of the other aspects of sustainability in terms of
economics and society and in a holistic manner.
We have transportation of different things.
We have transportation of raw materials, chemicals and the end product.
There is obviously energy consumption.
So energy consumption is a big chain by itself now.
We talked about global warming.
We talked about the use of fossil fuels and how much of energy is consumed to transport.
So one way or the other transportation has to occur either transportation of the raw
materials or the end products transportation is inevitable and there when you have transportation
you have secondary effects of transportation you have vehicle exhaust and things like that.
So that's the case.
Then we have manufacturing process which is usually the the most visible part of a life
cycle chart is that people focus all their attention on the manufacturing process and
that's the only thing that they look at because there are pollutants coming out of a process
usually, there is a lot of energy consumption and then there - but here we also have look
at secondary environmental effects of processes chemicals that are being supplied.
They are not manufactured here or used here.
They are used here but not manufactured here but there are secondary industries that do
that.
So you can look up examples in any region.
For example a cement plant uses limestone and limestone is usually located near a limestone
quarry or some such place.
So the facilities for these things are nearby and there is a large section of other subsidiary
industries that crop up which is economical, the economic environment of a particular process
involves secondary processes which are important for the sustainability of the economics of
that region as well.
Okay.
And we hear different stories about different communities and different industries getting
wiped out because there is a change in paradigm.
For example if you have electrical cars a lot of car manufacturing and their subsidiary
if cars have thousands of components and these components are made by smaller corporation
all of that would vanish.
So what that would do to an economic and social sustainability social and economic conditions
of certain large sections of people is something that needs to be evaluated as well.
So end users we have again distribution and energy consumption, waste generation, and
the secondary resource consumption.
Post use is the disposal is once the paper is being used what do you do with it and - so
the paper is an example, is a soft example of of various things and we saw this in the
previous lecture the case of contaminated sediments.
This waste management, there's the environmental effect of untreated waste and there is an
issue of liability and this can all come and hurt the corporation later.
So there is a methodology for life cycle assessment.
This has been developed over a period of time and the first part is you define the goal
and scope of the definition, and the second part is a life cycle inventory analysis and
the third is life cycle impact assessment and the interpretation of the life cycle So
we will go over each one of this, what it means in the context of mainly a paper manufacturing
industry and some other examples.
So we look at goals and scope of definition.
The first off we have to define what is the system boundary.
So in the flowchart that we gave for paper manufacture you can only look at paper manufacture,
not even pulp manufacturing, only the paper manufacturing part and say that what's happening
inside this and what coming in, what's going out and that's all your concern is only that
but you can increase the scope and you can say the scope of my analysis includes the
forest and other subsidiary companies that are there.
So this entire scope is big and you're saying what is going in, what is the raw material
going in, what is the end product coming out, what is happening to these and so on and the
entire impact of the entire process.
Obviously the scope and the complexity of the process increases as you increase the
scope and sometimes there are good reasons to do scope redefinition.
We have a very specific problem.
We have identified that one aspect of the process is causing more problems than other
and we look at only that and see if that is - which of this process is really making a
big impact.
So what we - whether we include the secondary and tertiary process and externalities.
So what we call externalities in this context is something that you yourself are not directly
getting.
So you are getting electricity from somewhere else, you are getting raw material from somewhere
else and you don't really know how it's -- that's being done.
Okay.
For example I am buying a product so I don't know where it's coming from.
I am using it.
So if I take that into account then my decisions about buying a certain type of product may
change.
So this is the example of externalities and whether how energy is to be produced and so
on.
So for example solar activity production I am - if I am interested in installing a solar
panel.
So my concern is only bringing a solar panel but I am not really looking at where the solar
panel is made, how is it made, whether that is a sustainable process and so on.
So if I want to include that my decisions about installing a solar panel may change
and then definition of system description, units of measures important when combining
secondary process and then data requirements and quality constraints.
So one of the biggest problems in LCA is that if you have such a large process sometimes
data is difficult to come by and you have to collect data and sometimes they may not
be the exact kind of data that you need.
For example availability of annual averages versus daily values for any part it may be
- you may have to interpret or interpolate and guess these values are calculated based
on some rationale and this is usually a problem.
The second part is the life cycle inventory analysis.
This is we are assigning.
This is a very important part and a very data-intensive part.
This in fact the backbone of the life cycle analysis is assigning values to different
processes leading to impact.
For example, very simply we look at X kilograms of paper pulp manufactured results in the
production of Y grams of a certain liquid waste which leads to an increase in water
pollution.
In this case Y needs to be estimated or measure.
The inventory of all such things should be calculated and measured and this is sometimes
a big problem and this data doesn't exist and one has to then study and get this data
and sometimes this is done by industry themselves.
Sometimes it's done by other people like universities or private consultants.
So based on the availability of this kind of data the system boundary may be again redefined.
And the third part of its life cycle impact assessment so the impact factors for example
we can do it as a midpoint or endpoint.
For example, for a category of impacts say global warming the midpoint is a rise in the
concentration of CO2 but this rise in concentration of CO2 is a midpoint because what really happen
because of a rise in CO2 is an increase in temperature but temperature increase may take
50 years for you to measure, if two degrees of rise in temperature will take or one degree
of rise will take 20 years then you can't wait for 20 years.
So you are looking at concentration of CO2 somewhere somehow CO2 has increased from if
it takes X amount of percentage increase of CO2 and that will lead to a certain increase
in temperature you can measure CO2 and say infer that this is going to cause a certain
increase in temperatures.
That's a midpoint or an intermediate point.
So it's not necessarily exactly a midpoint.
It's an intermediate point.
So in example in paper production the midpoint can mean increasing in the organic load in
effluent wastewater the corresponding end point can be increasing in acidity of the
water or the water's reaching - releasing the pollutant wastewater into soil necessarily
does not directly at that point in time result in an impact in health.
The impact in health will take maybe five years, four years so but this is an intermediate
point where we can measure and that is seen as an indicator.
When the end point is difficult to measure due to constraints in spatial or temporal
scales the midpoint can be considered and it's justifiable.
So interpolation here again one has to make interpret the data correctly and this is again
it's a holistic process.
This is something that determination of conclusions that throughout the process and it relies
on the efficiency of the data compilation and the correctness of this data that is collected
also and the recommendations and one has to make recommendations of the applicability
of the LCA; what are the policy changes or the management changes or the process change
that needs to be done using this LCA methodology.
Several tools are available.
Some of them are free to use called SimaPro, Gabi and a large number of databases.
This database is the biggest challenge constraint in terms of LCA methodology because this is
process driven and then enough studies must have been done either by the corporation or
sometimes the data is not available easily.
One has to go and get it and one has to worry about.
This is the role of regulatory agencies and other academic institutions becomes very important
in this kind of processes.
So let me just go and illustrate the categories by which impact assessment is done.
One of the impact categories that we can look at is say global warming and indicators for
global warming or global warming potential, the parameters that we are looking at is things
like CO2 and CH4 or methane concentration and weighing factors.
So what we mean by weighing factors is the effect of methane is 24 times the effect of
carbon dioxide.
So this is what is meant by a weighing factor.
So these numbers are all notional and there are not accurate numbers.
I am just giving you an example of what an impact assessment could mean.
Another impact category could be acidification of water or air or soil.
Any of these things.
So different components of this enter different parts of the environment.
So we have acidification potential.
The parameters are sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, HCL, ammonia and so on, and different
weighing factors.
We have eutrophication.
eutrophication as many of you would already know is the potential to form algae in water
and we have a large set of compound of nitrogen and phosphorus in the water and air and if
they have different kinds of weighing factors and these all - these numbers are notional
and not accurate and only for illustration purposes as I had mentioned.
The other set of another impact categories are non-renewable resource depletions.
So for example this is things like crude oil, they are not renewable.
There are fossil fuels.
We have crude oil, natural gas and coal and we have indicated this fraction per the static
reserve unit.
So what fraction of it is being used up and this indicates that how much of it is available
remaining.
So we're only using one three hundred of these available coal this thing and that will mean
that this reserve will last how much time after this process done.
Photochemical oxidants formation.
So this is an important fact.
Photochemical oxidation is an important process in urban air quality.
This is big focus on photochemical oxidation in few decades ago starting with the in Los
Angeles and other cities similar to its topography and there was a lot of research done there
because of smog formations, smog formation is important.
In many cities we see that and smog is a mixture of all the things that you can see in the
atmosphere and there is reactions going on and this reaction happens because of photochemical
oxidation because of sunlight and all that.
And certain chemicals are responsible or can aggravate photochemical oxidation and form
certain species of chemicals that will result in photochemical oxidation zone.
We have human health as an impact category and this human health is again divided into
two categories; human health non-cancer and human health cancer.
So as we have discussed in the first two lectures of this series we have - the way we find out
what the indicators for this our health effects eventually these health effects are epidemiological.
What it means by that is we can correlate as I mentioned in the first few lecture.
If you don't have physiological evidence for example you have a health impact because of
air pollution of a specific nature okay.
So one needs to find out whether that specific air pollutant is causing that health effect
or something else is causing.
So people look at statistics of how many people are exposed to it and the concentration the
outside and they try to correlate the concentration of the pollutant in the atmosphere to the
health effects.
So that's a indirect coalition, statistical correlation and this is called as epidemiological
and this looks is this takes service from and the hospital record have a very large
number of people and then makes this connection.
In contrast to this physiological evidence is direct evidence from the human body that
you find reserves of a particular pollutant there and says this is direct evidence that
this is causing this kind of effects and people do have toxicology data for many of these
things but not for humans.
We have it for other species and they are then interpolated to -- extrapolated to apply
apply to humans and there are various parameters.
These parameters are the concentrations of different species of chemicals that can cause
chemical impacts.
Any other impact category can be added to this if necessary and this example of this
will show you shortly.
So application to the paper industries data from LCA could be viewed in a few different
formats.
One format is the following.
We have a relative contribution from different processes.
For example, we have forests the the aspect of raising a forest, the way the trees are
grown from the pulp production, from paper production these are different processes in
the paper - this again is notional.
This is not the actual - these numbers are not actual and please have to take it in as
an illustrative but this can be done.
What I am trying to show is this can be done, calculations can be done using LCA to get
this kind of data interpretation.
So we have what is the global warming contribution by each of this process.
So in this process say the disposal causes the paper pulp production and disposal give
highest contributors to the global warming and so you can see that in different categories
are different kinds of human health cancer.
So it does not mean that all these risks are the same.
Each one may have a different amount, the actual human health cancer for potential may
be very small but these are the different distribution of these things different process
for that particular cause.
So these are not within that category.
There is a 100% distribution so actual numbers of this are not comparable human health cancer
cannot be compared with global warming.
Each one has its place.
There are two different aspects and cannot be pitted one against the other.
The other type of interpretation or the data view is like this is looking at the parameters
themselves and which one of these processes releases more of these parameters.
So this is sometimes a useful analysis to do because if you identify that CO2 is coming
from a particular process and you don't want it and you can focus on modifying that process
alone and to reduce the CO2.
So in some analysis we also have a negative contribution that people have made all of
advances and therefore they can - there is something called as a carbon credit system
or something especially applicable in some kinds of some category such as global greenhouse
gas potential and all that.
So we will not talk about it here.
It will be discussed in another module if possible.
Other examples of impact categories are ecotoxicity potential both terrestrial, aquatic and air.
Terrestrial is to land, to soil, to forests and anything that's there on land.
Aquatic is water and air ecotoxicity is again degeneration of the quality environmental
quality of these phases.
Abiotic depletion and then we have fresh water depletion.
This is a big case in a country like India this is an impact that is very significant.
We have several cases where industry several industries have been alleged to have take
deplete water supplies and if you go and look at paper reports and this is very important
this thing.
So environmental impacts this is not a health impact but this is an environmental impact
so this is -- there's also radioactive potential based on certain kinds of process; not all
processes use radioactivity material but definitely something like a nuclear reactor or something
which we have debates in several parts of this country that about the safety of having
nuclear reactors.
This is definitely a case.
So a large number of study on LCA and different products are available.
You can go and search say on Google Scholar or some such search engine search for LCA
for mobile phones for examples and you will get publications real-time examples and data
and I encourage you to do that for any industry of your choice.
One other thing that I would like to point out is the LCA for service industries and
most of us believe that one of the important points that we would like to make is for service
industry and most of us believe that LCA applies only to industries that manufacture something.
Service industries don't manufacture a product.
They manufacture software or service something like banking or IT industry or software and
you can notice that there are studies that have been done where the same kinds of categories
of impact exist here also.
The magnitude may be different.
The actual magnitude of global warming potential may be different from a service industry as
compared to a power plant but it does still exist and people are required to do it and
this categories are of course different.
You see that here we have things like equipment that a company might have, energy usage, temperature
control because air-conditioning is a big part of some of these industries software
industry and all that and then transportation is a big part.
Office supplies, specialty equipment.
So there is no - so hospitals for example.
There are service industry and hospitals have a very large potential for a lot of things
and therefore it has to be evaluated.
Again these numbers are notional and not is only for illustration.
This is an illustration of where the LCA is useful and how it should be implemented.
So if you look at this the extent of impact assessment, the assessment of the impact which
means that at what stage if you do the impact assessment in the design and development stage
if you put - if you do the impact actual impacts may be less if you do it here.
If you do the impact assessment here - if 80% of your impact assessment is done at this
stage you get actual impacts at here and if you don't do it, you do you really impact
only at the end of the process you get all of it.
So this is a kind of a suggestion that impact assessment, the design should be done at the
design stage so you must have all the aspects of the life cycle assessment of a process
to be done at the beginning.
So to the extend possible.
So it is always - it's not possible to predict everything that will happen but to the extent
possible one must have these categories calculated.
So we'll summarize this particular lecture and the entire module by whatever we discussed
here is that the design of processes must be evaluated from cradle to grave to the extent
possible.
So and this I think is important for maintaining he all aspects of our sustainable development
goals.
All impact must be evaluated at every stage.
Technology development must have LCA framework implicit in its design and must be included
in the business plan.
So a lot of time environmental impact or any of these things are seen as an externality,
as an overhead and what we mean by externality is they are dumped to somebody else.
So I think that should not be the case ideally and then one should incorporate everything
within the process and think about what kind of component one is including and making in
their process so that it makes it easier even at the expense that the society has to pay
for it.
So we are all part of this system.
So sometimes it becomes that if I make a sustainable product it's more expensive but then if all
of us buy into this philosophy then I think we all have to pay for it and this is an economic
concept that it also has some traction and some theories.
So technology has to evolve in order to meet and the data that's associated with evolving
technology must also be generated and all processes must adapt to create a more sustainable
environment and society.
Thank you very much.