Xinyu Liu
The Ohio State University
Xinyu Liu is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate from the Ohio State University working in Dr Bhavik Bakshi's group. Her work focuses on enhancing environmental sustainability by fostering synergies between technological and ecological systems. She developed a framework and the associated computational structure to explicitly consider the role of ecosystem service in life cycle assessment, with the aim for supporting economically-superior and environmentally-beneficial decision making.
Traditional development has taken nature for granted. Consequently, even the most sustainable engineering methods do not explicitly consider the role of ecosystem goods and services (ES). This is the root cause for ecosystem degradation. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been used widely as a tool to support environmental decision-making. Computational frameworks have been developed for various life cycle networks. However, LCA methodology does not account for ES and ecological capacity. The decisions from LCA are based on the comparison between alternatives, thus only provide insights on relative sustainability. This relative approach may lead to perverse decisions that depend on insufficient ES. To account for absolute environmental sustainability, ecological capacity for providing ES must be referenced explicitly, which can be achieved using techno-ecological synergy (TES) framework [1]. TES explicitly compares the demand for ES from technological activities and the supply of ES from surrounding ecosystems and thus sheds light on absolute environmental sustainability.
This work combines TES and LCA methods to develop a TES-LCA framework. Therefore, it is
able to capture life cycle impacts and account for ecological capacity simultaneously. The procedure for conducting TES-LCA is modified from that of conventional LCA to expand the analysis boundary to include the role of ecosystem goods and services. In the goal and scope definition step, TES-LCA determines the scope of ecosystems in addition to that of technological systems as in conventional LCA. In the inventory analysis step, both ES demand (i.e. environmental intervention) and supply data are compiled. In the impact assessment step, metric are defined to quantify ecological overshoot at multiple spatial scales, and provide insight into absolute sustainability. In the improvement analysis step, since both technological and ecological systems are considered, TES-LCA can provide not only traditional technological solutions which mainly aim for doing less bad; but also novel ecological solutions, such as ecological restoration to do more good.
Moreover, ecosystem components can be regarded just as ecological modules that input wastes from technological activities and output ES to human society. They can be connected to technological modules that utilize the ES as inputs or emit the wastes as outputs. By analogy, the computational framework for conventional LCA that includes mainly technological modules can be adapted to include ecological modules.
The developed TES-LCA framework and computational structure has the general applicability to support environmental decision making. Compared to conventional LCA methodology, TES-LCA can capture interaction between ES in an explicit manner, account for absolute sustainability, and identify novel improvement strategies through ecosystem restoration. The framework will be applied to a residential system and a biofuel supply chain. Successful applications to both case studies will demonstrate the robustness of TES-LCA while identifying the associated challenges, which point out the directions for future research work.
References:
[1] Bakshi, Bhavik, Guy Ziv, and Michael Lepech. "Techno-ecological synergy: A framework for sustainable engineering." Environmental Science & Technology 49.3 (2015): 1752-1760.
• Life cycle sustainability assessment , • Advances in methods (e.g., life cycle assessment, social impact assessment, resilience a
