Data Needs for Sustainability Assessments

Jeremy Gregory

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jeremy GregoryExecutive Director, Concrete Sustainability HubResearch Scientist, MIT Civil and Environmental EngineeringDr. Gregory studies the economic and environmental implications of engineering and system design decisions, particularly in the area of materials production and recovery systems. Research topics include product and firm environmental footprinting, manufacturing and life-cycle cost analysis, and characterization of sustainable material systems. He has applied these methods, often with industry partners, to a range of different products and industries including pavements, buildings, automobiles, electronics, consumer goods, and waste treatment and recovery.

Bhavik Bakshi

The Ohio State University

Bhavik Bakshi is the Morrow Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at The Ohio State University. He also holds appointments in Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering at OSU and as a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai,India. His research is developing methods and applications for assessing and designing sustainable systems that respect nature's limits and reduce the chance of unintended harm. He received his chemical engineering degrees from the University of Bombay and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a minor in technology and environmental policy from MIT and Harvard.

Anne-Marie Boulay

LIRIDE (Sherbrooke University) and CIRAIG (Polytechnique Montreal)

Anne-Marie Boulay, PhD, graduated from Chemical Engineering at McGill University in 2006 and later on integrated CIRAIG’s team at École Polytechnique of Montreal as a Master student in 2008.She finished her Ph.D. in 2013 on the assessment of water use impacts in LCA. She has become an expert on water footprint, providing water footprint training for UNEP and ISO in developing countries around the world and acting as the Canadian representative for the ISO Water Footprinting standard. It is for her PhD work on water use impacts in LCA that she received the SETAC Europe Young Scientist Award in 2014. She is currently chairing the WULCA working group on water use in LCA of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative and the LEAP working group of FAO on water footprint. These working groups are leading the consensus building process and the scientific work into achieving harmonized methods for assessing water footprint metrics, involving key method developers and stakeholders through an international collaborative effort.

Lise Laurin

EarthShift Global

Lise Laurin is the CEO and Founder of EarthShift Global. Lise has been working with Sustainable Return on Investment (S-ROI) for over 17 years and uses the methodology to assist Fortune 500 companies and government agencies in decision making.

Daniel D Moran

Industrial Ecology Programme, NTNU

Daniel Moran is an environmental economist specializing in analysis of the social and environmental dimensions of global supply chains. Daniel helped develop the original Ecological Footprint accounts, and more recently, the Eora global trade database. Eora documents >5 billion global supply chains in both physical and economic terms and is used at over 700 universities and research institutes worldwide. Daniel holds a PhD from the School of Physics at the University of Sydney and before that studied at Lund University and in the US.

Rupert Myers

Yale University,

Rupert Myers is a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Industrial Ecology at Yale University.

Gregor Wernet

ecoinvent

Gregor Wernet is the Executive Director of ecoinvent and has been involved in the development of the ecoinvent database since 2005.

Yi Yang

CSRA Inc.

Yi is a senior civil engineer at CSRA Inc., where his primary job is to develop environmentally extended input-output models for the US Environmental Protection Agency. Over the past few years, he has studied the environmental sustainability of agriculture and renewable energy in the U.S. Yi holds a PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara.

Abstract

There are numerous methodologies available to conduct quantitative sustainability assessments (where sustainability is used in a broad sense to encompass analyses that include economic, environmental, or social impacts). They include economic, environmental, and social life cycle assessments (or integrated life cycle sustainability assessments) of products or processes; material flow or metabolism analyses of regions (possibly coupled with availability information to assess scarcity); network or system models of industrial symbiosis or circular economies; and valuation of ecosystem services. The objectives and scopes of these analyses may be quite different, but they share a common objective of understanding the sustainability of anthropogenic activities.

Moving these approaches from academic to policy or commercial arenas relies heavily on the availability of high quality data. There have been efforts in the US to create publicly available life cycle inventory (LCI) data for environmental life cycle assessments. A new effort is underway to create a North American life cycle inventory data center. The current focus of the effort is on life cycle inventory data for process-based environmental impact assessments of products or processes. However, there is potential to expand the scope of the effort to include data for other types of sustainability assessments as well.

This special session will explore the potential overlap indata needs for different types of sustainability assessments. An overview of the NA LCI data center effort will be given (Jeremy Gregory, MIT) and then panelists will give brief overviews of different types of sustainability assessments and the associated data requirements and issues. The topics and speakers will include process-based LCA (Gregor Wernet, ecoinvent), social LCA (Lise Laurin, EarthShift Global), water footprinting (Anne-Marie Boulay, CIRAIG/WULCA), ecosystem services (Bhavik Bakshi, OSU), material flow analysis (Rupert Myers, Yale), US environmentally extended input-output (Yi Yang, CSRI Inc), and multi-regional input-output (Daniel Moran, NTNU). The remainder of the session will be a facilitated discussion with the audience about finding common elements of the data requirements and discussing the merits and feasibility of an integrateddatabase.

Authors

Jeremy Gregory (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Bhavik Bakshi (The Ohio State University)
Anne-Marie Boulay (LIRIDE (Sherbrooke University) and CIRAIG (Polytechnique Montreal))
Lise Laurin (EarthShift Global)
Daniel D Moran (Industrial Ecology Programme, NTNU)
Rupert Myers (Yale University,)
Gregor Wernet (ecoinvent)
Yi Yang (CSRA Inc.)

Topic Areas

• Life cycle sustainability assessment , • Advances in methods (e.g., life cycle assessment, social impact assessment, resilience a , • Decision support methods and tools

Session

ThS-18 » Special session: "Data Needs for Sustainability Assessments" (11:30 - Thursday, 29th June, Room I)

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