MECH 430 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Life-Cycle Assessment, Circular Economy
9 Jun 2018
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Strategies for Sustainability Feb 1st
Theme 2 : Measuring Sustainability, Marketing Labels & Regulations
- Nothing is green in an absolute term. It is relative.
Measuring Sustainability at different levels
- Individuals
- Products/Services
- Corporate
- Country
Challenges to measuring
- What are you measuring
- Who is doing the measurements
- Where are you measuring
- When in time do you measure
- Why is an entity measuring (marketing purpose ?)
- How is sustainability measured
Life Cycle Assessment
- Gate to Gate (focus on one step of the lifecycle ex:manufacturing)
- Cradle to Gate (focus on resource
extraction→refining→commodity/chemical/manufacture→fine/chemical/manufacture)
- Cradle to Grave (focus on entire life cycle : circular economy)
Cradle to Cradle
- No extraction, only refining
What is net green?
- Reduces overall environmental impact
Green house gas protocol has some flaws (ex : Not all gas trap same amount of heat in atmosphere)
Watch out for environmental folklore/ green washing
- Sustainability metrics are data intensive
- Sustainability assessments are unlikely to be definitive
find more resources at oneclass.com
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