Man YU
The University of New South Wales
Man Yu is a PhD candidate in Sustainable Engineering and Industrial Ecology at the UNSW Sustainability Assessment Program working on Hybrid Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment of Construction Projects in Australia. Before commencing her PhD candidature, Man Yu worked at the United Nations Development Program China in the field of climate change policy and sustainable urbanisation. Prior to that, she graduated from a European Commission funded Master’s program named Erasmus Mundus Master’s Program in Industrial Ecology. In general, Man Yu is interested in areas related to climate change, renewable energy, built environment, industrial ecology and sustainable living.
Hybrid life cycle assessment (LCA), combining conventional process-based LCA and environmentally-extended input-output analysis (EEIOA) in a variety of ways, has been developed for almost 40 years and applied across a range of disciplines, including construction, transport, chemicals production, waste management practices and energy production technologies, amongst others. However, the uptake of the hybrid methods has been limited because questions remain around system boundaries, double counting and practical implementation.
The most sophisticated form of hybridisation is the integrated hybrid LCA as it applies a consistent mathematical framework and it covers complete process data and IO data. However, compiling the cut-off matrices requires high data and time commitment. This study intends to develop and automate an integrated hybrid LCA model for non-hybrid LCA specialists.
This model uses full datasets from Ecoinvent process inventories in combination with the EEIOA data from the Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IElab) which are in the form of a supply use matrix extended with several satellite accounts. IElab provides the most comprehensive breakdown of the Australian economy at the level of 2214 spatial areas and 1284 economic sectors, which enables both flexible and detailed analysis.
At the core of the implementation lies an automated procedure to link process data to IO data by writing and applying an algorithm that fills in missing information in the upstream and downstream matrices of the integrated system. This is achieved by automated sector recognition, price conversion, adoption of technical coefficients and elimination of double counting.
Once the Australian integrated hybrid LCA model has been developed and automated, it will be used to assess the life cycle environmental impacts of different construction materials (e.g. concrete, steel, timber, etc.) as a case study application. Construction materials are the major contributors to the embodied environmental impacts of construction projects, and the construction sector in Australia plays a dominant role in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and materials consumption, manifesting far-reaching implications on energy use, natural resources depletion and wastes generation. The results will be compared with the results obtained by other pure and hybrid LCA methods to demonstrate how the results will be influenced by applying different approaches. An uncertainty analysis based on Monte-Carlo simulation will be presented.
By developing and applying a fully integrated hybrid LCA model, this study will assist in the comprehensive and quick assessment on embodied environmental impacts at a high level of detail and completeness.
