Final Report Summary - PROSUITE (Development and application of standardized methodology for the PROspective SUstaInability assessment of TEchnologies)
Executive Summary:
SUSTAINABILITY: SEEKING TO BALANCE ECONOMIC, ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL GOAL.
Europe 2020 aims to foster "smart, sustainable, inclusive growth" in the European Union. Economic, environmental, and social goals are intertwined. Traditionally, public and private sector activities might give a high priority to just one or two families of goals. Today, we ask for “triple bottom line” accounting – success is measured not just in terms of sole economic gain, or of environmental protection, or of ethical correctness and the well-being of individuals and communities. There is growing awareness that we must take care of all these goals simultaneously. “Sustainability” has become a catchword. It has many definitions (for instance: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”; or “improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems”…). To ensure sustainability, we must find an appropriate, durable balance between the three families of goals.
SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT: CHECKING ECONOMIC, ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL PERFORMANCE.
A whole new set of tools must be developed to analyze activities and their consequences upon the economy, the environment, and society. The tools must be adequate for measuring these complex domains, as well as their interactions (like “rebound effects” that may take place when changes are made in one area). Performing such sustainability assessment should help point to better solutions – highlighting where performance should be improved, where corrections should be made, where wiser choices can lead to a preferred “triple bottom line” result. PROSUITE, a four-year (2009-2013) project funded in part by the European Commission, gathered scientists and industrialists in an effort to provide such new tools, for assessing new technologies in particular.
PROSUITE: COMPLETE SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF TECHNOLOGIES, TODAY AND TOMORROW
The European PROSUITE project has provided these tools by delivering a broad life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. The freely accessible tools are designed to support the actual sustainability decisions that product developers, policy makers and businesses are facing. They have been tested on four hot technologies: Biorefineries – producing energy from organic waste; Nanotechnology - in new textiles; Multifunctional mobile (telephone) devices - containing rare metals that should be recycled; Carbon storage and sequestration - to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and large-scale industrial sources. PROSUITE tools and concepts go beyond the traditional three pillars, in order to deliver even more detailed and meaningful results for decision makers. Today they can use the PROSUITE 5-pillar framework for assessment, which is supported by a freeware Decision Support System.
THE PROSUITE INNOVATION: A 5-PILLAR APPROACH
When sustainability is defined only on the traditional 3 pillars, existing assessments may be flawed by "overlaps". For instance, human health and income could be viewed as part of the social pillar, since both factors have a large influence on the quality of life of people – however, they also could be viewed as part of the economic pillar! To enable proper assessment, Prosuite developed an innovative framework that limits such overlapping and ensures that each pillar has a unique set of indicators. To achieve this goal, the resulting framework proposes five pillars: 1. IMPACT ON HUMAN HEALTH, 2. IMPACT ON SOCIAL WELL-BEING, 3. IMPACT ON PROSPERITY, 4. IMPACT ON NATURAL ENVIRONMENT, 5. IMPACT ON EXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCES.
Project Context and Objectives:
The Lisbon Strategy aims to make the European Union "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment by 2010”. This core statement shows the complexity of societal aspirations. Economic, environmental, and social goals are intertwined.
Traditionally, public and private sector activities might give a high priority to just one or two families of goals. Today, we ask for “triple bottom line” accounting – success is measured not just in terms of sole economic gain, or of environmental protection, or of ethical correctness and the wellbeing of individuals and communities. Today, there is growing awareness that we must take care of all these goals simultaneously.
A whole new set of tools must be developed to measure, analyze and assess activities and their consequences upon the economy, the environment, and society. The tools must be adequate to address the complexity of each of these domains, and also to capture their interactions. Performing such sustainability assessment should help point to better solutions – highlighting where performance should be improved, where corrections should be made, where wiser choices can lead to a preferred “triple bottom line” result. PROSUITE gathers scientists and industrialists in an effort to provide such new tools, for assessing new technologies in particular.
PROSUITE aimed to develop a coherent, scientifically sound methodology for the sustainability assessment of current and future technologies. It considered the whole life cycle (from a technology’s use of primary materials through to the production and handling of wastes). The PROSUITE tools can be applied to well-developed technologies, or to ones that are just emerging. To achieve this objective PROSUITE worked with stakeholders – small and medium enterprises (SMEs), large industries, regulators, and analysts – to be sure that the developed tools rely on shared, agreed and acceptable assumptions. Stakeholders helped too, to check that the tools are easy to apply and respond to their needs.
PROSUITE delivered actual sustainability estimates for 4 technology cases: Biorefineries, in which energy is produced from organic waste; Nanotechnology, focusing on nanoparticles in new textiles; Multifunctional mobile (telephone) devices, containing rare metals that should be recycled; Carbon storage and sequestration, as a technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and large-scale industrial sources.
Project Results:
SUMMARY: The project aimed to deliver a broad life cycle assessment (LCA) framework, taking into account the three pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental and social. We targeted an integrated methodology, one that would not just paste existing methodologies together, but instead support the actual holistic decisions that product developers, policy makers and businesses must perform. We also insisted on demonstrating the approach through case study assessments on four emergent technologies of varying scale. Our team included several individuals and organizations who have made important contributions already to LCA, and also dedicated young researchers who have brought new energies. Relying on the vast body of knowledge on assessments in all these areas, we have been able to make an important step forward.
In the four years of the project (2009-2013) we have innovated on all components of sustainability assessment, but especially in building an integrated approach, in terms of both concepts and practical tools. Prosuite proposes to go beyond the traditional three pillars, focusing instead on five major impact categories under which all primary impacts can be grouped. This resulted in a 5-pillar framework for assessment, which is supported by a freeware Decision Support System.
MEETING THE NEED: Technologies have always been the engine of progress and change. New technologies are developing continuously. Many have drastically changed our lives in the last decades and some have been controversial in terms of the net benefit they bring to society. The challenge is to know upfront, before the technologies are introduced, how sustainable they are. The term sustainability was introduced in 1987 in the context of efforts to reconcile the conflict between environmental protection and economic development. Nowadays it is widely accepted that sustainability should be defined along the three pillar social-environ- mental-economic, often referred to as people- planet-profit or the ‘triple bottom line’. The impact of technologies is often examined in terms of these three dimensions. Sustainability assessment of new technologies is important for many players in society, e.g. (1) for the public debate to assess alternative technology pathways, (2) for companies to decide on strategic investment decisions and (3) for policy makers to formulate and implement R&D and innovation policies.
Many initiatives aimed at assessing the sustainability of products and/or services have been developed over the years or are under development. These approaches have their merits but are not applicable in a generic way to all aspects of sustainability for a technology. What was missing was an objective assessment methodology to evaluate whether a technology helps to address important sustainability challenges or merely creates new ones. The Prosuite (Prospective SUstaInability assessment of TEchnologies) project was set up to fill this gap.
CLEARLY DEFINED PILLARS: When sustainability is defined in terms solely of social, environmental and economic dimensions there are overlaps, even to the extent that some impacts could largely include some of the others. For instance, human health and income could be viewed as contributors to the social pillar, since both factors have a large influence on the quality of life of people. They could alternatively be assigned to the economic pillar if both are cast in monetary terms. To be able to do a proper assessment, indicators should be chosen in such a way that there is no overlap and that together they represent all potential sustainability impacts. Prosuite developed a specific framework that limits this overlap and ensures that each pillar has a unique set of indicators. In fact, to achieve this goal, the resulting framework proposes five major impact categories under which all primary impacts can be distinctly grouped. These categories or pillars are:
1. Impact on Human Health
2. Impact on Social Well-being
3. Impact on Prosperity
4. Impact on Natural Environment
5. Impact on Exhaustible Resources.
A limiting factor of most current sustainability assessment methodologies is that there is no explicit definition of the cause-effect chain and no scientific and transparent calculation methodology. An exception to this is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which allows for the identification of trade-offs between different impacts as well as the shifting of burdens from one life cycle stage to another. A rigorous treatment of the cause-effect chain is followed in the impact assessment, which means that all impacts are calculated in the same way and go through the same steps. These useful elements were applied in the development of the new Prosuite approach. The result is a methodology that includes the strong points of LCA, but that also has many additional strong points. The new method provides a scientifically robust and reproducible framework capable of an overarching and comprehensive assessment of different impacts.
PILLAR #1 HUMAN HEALTH The Human Health category describes the impact of a technology on the health of human beings around the world. There are many factors that influence human health, such as food and water, the state of the physical environment in which the person lives, working conditions and of course dis- eases. Since every human being wishes to live a healthy life negative health impacts should be avoided. Technologies can have a negative health impact, which can be classified as work related (occupational health impacts), environment related (environmental human health impacts) and product consumption related (consumer health impacts). The impact on Human Health is expressed in ‘Disability Adjusted Life Years’ (DALY), which indicates the number of healthy life years that are lost due to sickness or disability and premature death. This concept combines information on the quality of life and life expectancy in one indicator, which is calculated as the sum of the ‘Years Lived with Disability’ (YLD) and the ‘Years of Life Lost’ (YLL). The Years Lived with Disability includes the duration of the disease or disability and a weighting factor that is determined by the severity of the disease or disability, ranging between 0 (complete health) to 1 (death). The DALY concept is well-established and for many types of diseases, disability weights have been established throughout the years.
Negative impact on human health can occur through different pathways, which are rep- resented in the methodology through three indicators: Occupational Health, Environmental Human Health and Consumer Health. Indicators contributing to the final impact on Human Health occur through very different pathways, creating the need for different approaches to be implemented in their impact assessment methods. The PROSUITE project specifically contributed to the further development of these methods by developing a new impact assessment methodology for Occupational Health (the work related health). The new methods quantifies the burden of disease per economic sector output. Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from the World Health Organization were therefore linked to employment and production data from the economic model. Seven types of occupational diseases were included, i.e. (1) cancer of the trachea, bronchus or lung; (2) leukemia; (3) asthma; (4) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); (5) noise-induced hearing loss (NHL); (6) low back pain (LBP); and (7) occupational injuries.
PILLAR #2 SOCIAL WELL-BEING: Treatment of social well-being is relatively new in the field of quantitative impact assessment at product and technology level. Prosuite has made one of the first attempts to develop a comprehensive method to measure the impact on social well-being with a life cycle perspective. The social impact assessment includes impacts on human well- being that are related to inter-human relationships. This includes a broad range of path- ways that affect the quality of life of people on both an individual and a collective basis.
The method developed within PROSUITE groups the impacts on social well-being in four categories:
(1) Autonomy: ‘being in control of oneself and one’s resources’. Autonomy is negatively impacted by for example, forced labour or slavery
(2) Safety, Security and Tranquillity: as a combination of ‘freedom from threats to personal health (Safety)’, ‘freedom from threats to personal property (Security)’ and ‘freedom from excessive stress (Tranquillity)’. Safety, Security and Tranquillity are for example negatively impacted by unemployment.
(3) Equality: representing the level of disparity among countries and regions. Equality is for example negatively impacted by increasing disparity in income distribution.
(4) Participation and Influence: ‘the act of taking part or sharing in something and affecting the course of events’.
There are many possible indicators to address impacts of a technology on Social Well-being. Prosuite selected eleven indicators (6 quantitative and 5 qualitative) as most relevant for the technologies considered in the project. This set is by no means exhaustive and can later be expanded as soon as primary impacts are identified that are relevant for other technologies. The quantitative indicators include:
• Knowledge-intensive Jobs, refers to the effect of the prospective technology on the amount of highly-skilled employment. The indicator is used together with the indicator on total employment as a proxy for the value of employment in society.
• Total Employment, refers to the total employment caused by the introduction of the prospective technology. Total Employment is the working share of the labour force (the overall part of society that is available for work).
• Regional Income Inequalities, refers to the degree to which regional income inequalities are affected by the introduction of the prospective technology. Regional Income Inequalities are structural disparities between salary levels, which represent the gap between the rich and poor within a region.
• Global Income Inequalities, refers to the degree to which global income inequalities are affected by the introduction of the novel technology. Global Income Inequalities regard the disparities between GDP levels around the world.
• Child Labour, refers to the change in the number of children working in hazardous forms of child labour caused by the intro- duction of the prospective technology. Child Labour is defined by the number of children under legal age who perform hazardous work with companies active in the supply chain of the technology.
• Forced Labour, refers to the forced labour caused by the introduction of the novel technology. Forced Labour is all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and not undertaken voluntarily by the person.
The qualitative indicators include:
• Risk Perception, refers to the potential public resistance with regard to the introduction of the prospective technology. Change in Risk Perception is the difference between the attribution by the general public of hazard due to the introduction of the new technology compared to the reference technology.
• Possibility of Misuse, refers to the potential to misuse a technology so that it harms people or the environment. Although possibility of misuse is related to not only the technology characteristics but also the intention of the user, in Prosuite only the former is currently assessed, by linking Possibility of Misuse to change in asset vulnerability.
• Trust in Risk Information, refers to the confidence that one will be informed in case of hazard due to the introduction of the prospective technology.
• Stakeholder Involvement, refers to the degree to which the interested parties are involved in decision-making processes concerning the prospective technology, and the quality and intensity of these participation procedures.
• Long-term Control Functions, refers to the degree to which people trust that the technology is adequately controlled. Long term Control Functions are governance or technical instruments such as regulating authorities or systems that ensure long- term control.
Six of the indicators are quantitative and can be assessed using tools available in the Open source decision support system. The remaining five are qualitative indicators and need to be mapped using expert elicitation. The project resulted in a Practical Guidance Document for Social Assessment including recommended methods to use and complement expert elicitation and guidance on how to interpret results. In contrast to the environmental domain, where the desired direction for each indicator is clear (minimize the impact of a sub- stance in the environment) and the magnitude is based on absolute quantities, social indicators are more complex as incommensurable data need to be combined and the desired direction of the indicators changes (e.g. to increase Social Well-being we would like to decrease child labour but we would like to increase employment). Besides PROSUITE develop a method to aggregate the quantitative indicators in order to come to one overall quantitative score for the impact on Social Well-being.
As already indicated the Prosuite methodology represents one of the first attempts to develop a comprehensive and quantitative method to measure impact on social well- being. Further improvement is expected, for example regarding developing a method that allows measurement of indicators in the unit ‘Well-being Adjusted Life Years’. This indicator, comparable to the DALY measure for human health, would express the years of well-being that are lost compared to an ideal state of uncompromised social well-being. Further research is needed to determine the incidence and duration of the social impacts on a person and the weight factors that indicate the degree to which certain impacts influence Social Well-being
PILLAR #3 PROSPERITY: Technological innovation is universally accepted to be an important source for economic growth. The impact category Prosperity focuses on the potential impact of technologies on affluence. The economic impact of a technology/product can be linked to a change in the added value created by introducing the new technology, measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is a generally accepted and widely avail- able measure for prosperity. Gross Domestic Product allows us to express the economic impact of new technologies in monetary terms. The Prosperity assessment consists of two steps: (1) the micro assessment to gain insight into all the expenditures related to the technology and (2) the macro assessment to gain insight into how these expenditures influence macro level impacts (Labour, Capital and Resource Productivity and ultimately Gross Domestic Product).
The micro economic assessment includes a careful and precise assessment of all costs related to a technology. The methodology developed within PROSUITE uses the factorial approach in which cost components are estimated using factors and percentages based on purchased equipment costs, geared towards chemical plants. This approach can be realized using a limited amount of data, namely a list of equipment required for the technology. Therefore it is especially practical for the assessment of new or emerging technologies. A model (SCENT tool) to perform the micro analysis is included in the Prosuite DSS. Formulas have been included to estimate the costs at the right functional unit and capacity level. The database solely focuses on chemical data, the micro assessment tool in the DSS is therefore not applicable for non-chemical plants. Assessments for technologies or products outside the chemical sector therefore require a separate manual calculation of micro costs using the same formulas, which are listed in a report “Recommended methodology and tool for cost estimates at micro level for new technologies available in the Prosuite online library”
The macro analysis aims to give insight into the impacts of a technology on the economy when it has fully penetrated the market. It aims to answer the question whether a technology has a macro-economic impact. More precisely: does the selection of a specific technology lead to additional economic growth that would not happen if one had invested in a different technology/sector instead? The macro analysis within PROSUITE is conducted with the model THEMIS. THEMIS is a hybrid input-output model, developed from the EXIOPOL database with related projects for the Prosperity impact category.
An important step in the macro assessment is a market analysis to estimate the potential market volume. This requires a survey or another form of market research. Estimation of the market is necessary because environmental, economic and social aspects become relevant or apparent only if the technology reaches and exceeds a certain level of implementation. Investigating the impact of technology through only the functional unit ignores this aspect, so analysis must occur at full-scale implementation. It’s only then that resource constraints or resource conflicts, macro-economic effects and social tensions can become apparent. An estimate of the macro-impact of a technology hence requires the estimation of the production volume of the technology output. For this aim the PROSUITE project refined and tested a diffusion module, in which a vintage capital model has been implemented under a S-shaped diffusion curve, also taking into account consumer preference.
PILLAR #4 NATURAL ENVIRONMENT: The impact category Natural Environment describes the impact of technologies on the natural ecosystems around the world3. Negative impacts on ecosystems -can occur as a consequence of exposure to chemicals, biological and physical interventions such as cutting wood or mining. Essentially the category Natural Environment aims to provide insight into change to and loss of species richness. The impact on Natural Environment is expressed as the potential number of species disappearing over time. The unit for this is species*year, which can be interpreted as the number of species that has a high probability of no occurrence in a region, due to unfavourable conditions, integrated over time.
The analysis of the impact on Natural Environment focuses on the negative impacts on freshwater, marine and terrestrial (land) ecosystems, though some contributors affect all three (see figure 12). The negative impacts can be caused by several contributors such as land use, acidification and cli- mate change. The impact of each contributor on the natural environment is calculated to get insight into the total impact on the natural environment. Since impact on Natural Environment has been explored thoroughly in the past, many LCIA methods are already available. The impact assessment methods recommended in the ILCD handbook were used as the primary basis for method selection by Prosuite. The ILCD handbook methods are viewed as the best alternatives for each specific impact category available at its time of publication, such as climate change and terrestrial ecotoxicity. For other categories, Prosuite retained newly released methods from the LC-IMPACT project. These updates were developed in light of the the ILCD handbook suggestions for improvement, and were thus identified by Prosuite as the new best available methods
PILLAR #5 EXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCES: The major impact category Exhaustible Resources concerns the removal of resources from the earth, whether this is for the production of fuel or as a raw material. The category encompasses only abiotic non-renewable resources, which are non-liv-resources will be available for future generations. Furthermore, the most accessible stock is usually recovered first, meaning that future generations will need more effort to reach the following stock available. Both the reduced availability and increased difficulty to reach future stock will result in a resource shortage and increased resource costs. The impact on Exhaustible Resources is expressed in US dollars. This indicates the expected cost increase caused by the extraction of resources now
Impact on Exhaustible Resources has been explored thoroughly in the past, so several impact assessment methods were already available. The ILCD handbook analyzed existing impact assessment methods and found a number of weaknesses in the methods for Exhaustible Resources. Taking account of these weaknesses new methods were developed by the LC-IMPACT project. These new methods are more scientifically robust and reliable than previous methods, and are thus recommended for the sustainability assessment of technologies.
AGGREGATION: The ambition of the sustainability assessment of technologies is to enable:
• Comparison of the sustainability impacts of alternative technologies to provide a given service
• Support for the development of sustainability policies (e.g. product policy, technology action plans)
• Strategic decision making in companies.
An aggregate sustainability impact end score alone would not fully serve such goals - underlying values are very relevant as well. Many important insights spring from examination of the contributors, such as impact on labour productivity, occupational health or land use, etc. Still the Prosuite methodology allows the practitioner to obtain an end score by going through the steps of optional weighting and then, weighted aggregation.
STEP A: NORMALISATION: For this aim a set of Normalisation factors was developed for each of the 5 impact categories. Normalisation is a procedure needed to show to what extent an impact category has a significant contribution to the overall sustainability outcome. This is done by dividing the impact category indicators by a “reference” value. There are different ways to determine the “reference” value. The most common procedure is to determine the impact category indicators for a region during a year and, if desired, divide this result by the number of inhabitants in that area. The impact of the product under study can then be compared to the impact of an average inhabitant of a region in a year. The normalised results show the order of magnitude of the problems generated by the product’s life cycle, compared to the total sustainability loads in Europe.
STEP B:WEIGHTING is a step needed to further aggregated normalised values into a single sustainability score. To aggregate to one score a weight is assigned to each major impact category. This weight indicates the relative importance of a given category that is attributed by the assessor or evaluator. Weighting is the most controversial step in life cycle impact assessment, as in fine it is a subjective value-based judgment. Nevertheless, in order to contribute to the transparency and founded basis of such subjective evaluations, a set of “examples of weighting factors” is provided in Prosuite regarding the five major impact categories of the methodology. These weighting factors were developed through workshops with interested parties of various nationalities. This among other resulted in a report on how to obtain weighting factors for PROSUITE impact categories.
STEP C: AGGREGATION: There are several methodologies that can be used to aggregate indicators. In Prosuite two are recommended: aggregation to weighted sum and outranking analysis. PROSUITE recommends that the user uses both aggregation methods and assesses the results together with the graphical display and supplementary information (e.g. results of the qualitative indicators in the social assessment) before drawing a conclusion on the sustainability of the technology under study.
CASE STUDIES: PROSUITE delivered actual sustainability estimates for 4 technology cases, with close consultation of the stakeholders involved. The four emergent (new) technologies were selected for study because (i) they have the potential for large-scale implementation, (ii) they will generate products or services with medium to high value added, (iii) they involve innovative processes, and (iv) they show large potential impacts on several economic sectors.
The cases are: BIOREFINERIES – technology to produce energy from organic waste; NANOTECHNOLOGY focusing on nanoparticles in new textiles; MULTIFUNCTIONAL MOBILE (telephone) devices containing rare metals that should be recycled; CARBON STORAGE AND SEQUESTRATION as a technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and large-scale industrial sources. The case studies were used to: test the new assessment framework and methods developed within PROSUITE and to test the DSS. Results of the impact assessments are laid down in 4 public deliverables and a large number of scientific journals that can be downloaded from the PROSUITE website.
DECISSION SUPPORT SYSTEM: All methods and tools developed within PROSUITE are integrated into a decision support system that is developed on the existing basis of openLCA. OpenLCA is an open source software originated and maintained by Prosuite partner GreenDelta. It can be freely downloaded from the openLCA website.
Potential Impact:
The PROSUITE project use(d) a range of tools and channels to communicate on the finding of our project results but also to collect input from the stakeholders on their needs and wishes.
WEBSITE: The project website was set up at the start of the project and launched in March 2010 (www.prosuite.org). A wiki space has been promoted as a platform for sharing document, and is being used as such. Substantial updates of the website have been made regularly and throughout the project duration to commensurate with the evolution of the PROSUITE project and the project results. A new update (4th update) was implemented and went live by end of November 2013. This lasts update was implemented to ensure good display of all project finding, also after the project has officially finished.
The website was used to: (1) promote PROSUITE events (workshop and stakeholder events) and inform the public on the outcome of these events; (2) provide an overview and inform the public on release of new deliverables and (journal) publications; (3) provide a calendar on gatherings (conferences, symposia, workshops and working group meeting) were the project team member presented findings on the project; (4) 7display web lectures and video’s; (5) provide a platform for the users of the DSS, including web-based tutorials.
Web statistics show that the number of visits was limited in the first 1-2 years of the project but has increased significantly as a result of various website updates and more active communication of the project results. Up to end of November we had almost 7,500 unique visitors and 63% new visitors.
PUBLICATIONS: In total 35 public deliverables were produced during the course of the project (in accordance with the DoW). Besides 5 additional deliverables were produced and published on the website and uploaded to SESAM. Release of finalized deliverables was actively communicated through news items on the website, the newsletters and tweets.
The project team has been very active in publishing the project finding in scientific journals. In total 45 articles have been published or submitted to scientific journals up to November 2013, with the majority of the papers published or submitted in the final year of the project (Figure 6). Six papers are under preparation and will be submitted next year, besides several more are being planned for publication.
PRESENTATIONS: Team members presented the project results at various conferences, workshops and other meetings were the target group for our project was present. Over the course of the project 43 presentations were held: (1) Type of audience varied from the scientific community, specialized industrial groups and policy makers. Because of the novelty of the topic, focus was on the scientific audiences and experts in the field of sustainability assessment; (2) Size of the audience at conferences and meeting varied from 50 to 2500 participants, (3) Majority (almost 70%) of the conferences where Prosuite results were presented attracted a worldwide audience, 20% a pure European audience, and 10% a national audience, and most of the partners were active in disseminating project finding through presentations.
WORKSHOPS/STAKEHOLDER EVENST/CONFERENCES: Workshops, stakeholder consultations and conferences have been ongoing throughout the project lifetime. In total 15 workshops and stakeholder meetings (organized as stand-alone workshops or as side events at conferences) were carried out over the course of the project, with most activities taking place as foreseen principally in the last two years of the project. The number of participants ranged from 7 to 80, and the average number of participants was 24. Through these events we have been able to reach a broad group of stakeholders in Europe, active in various industry sectors and government levels.
Over 80 participants from across Europe and beyond attended the Final PROSUITE conference under the chairmanship of Mr. Michele GALATOLA (coordinator of the EU Ecolabel – DG Environment; original Scientific Officer for PROSUITE). A wide audience of policy makers, industrial actors, consultants and academics took this opportunity to learn about our novel framework and tools for the sustainability impact assessment of new technologies, to witness the case study assessments and also to receive the handbook which accompanied our decision support system. Thanks to the Final Project Conference, new partnerships have been launched that presage further development of the PROSUITE DSS and applications, including reinforcement of the onboard databases, which at term should render the tools and the LCSA approach overall more accessible to SMEs.
NEWSLETTERS: Six Newsletters have been released during the project life time. In the course of the 4 year project we have been able to create a substantial growth of our audiences for the Newsletter. During the release of the first 4 newsletters our database included 225 contacts. In the last 2 years of the project we have extended the database to 800 contacts. However, a much larger larger audience was reached with our Newsletter as all project team members were urged to forward the Newsletter to their personal contact and Newsletters were posted to various email listing and discussion groups: (1) LCA Discussion list moderated by Pre Consultant (2500 subscriptions), (2) JRC Life Cycle Thinking and Assessment Email list, (3) Mailing list at University of Barcelona, (4) LinkedIn Life Cycle Assessment group (3846 members)
WEB BASED TUTORIAL AND VIDEO’S: The website holds web-based tutorial and video’s aimed at (1) communicating the PROSUITE finding towards a broader audience, (2) teasing visitors to further dive into the results produced by the project. Through these web based tutorials and video’s we have open up a whole new communications channels that was not foreseen in the DoW.
TWITTER/LINKEDIN UPDATES: Twitter is deployed by the Coordinator as an additional dissemination channel and systematically announces our newsletter releases. 58 Tweets have been sent out since the beginning of the project. Various team member have posted updated on the PROSUITE project on their LinkedIn profile.
HANDBOOK: A “Handbook on a Novel methodology for the sustainability impact assessment of new technologies” was produced in the final year of the project. This Handbook provides a compact overview on the PROSUITE framework and the indicators and the approaches taken for each of the five PROSUITE pillars. The 60 pages booklet was produced with an attractive design and hardcopies were first distributed during the final conference in Brussels. The updated digital version of the Handbook has a prominent place on the homepage of the PROSUITE website.
With respect to the wider social implications we like to highlight Collaboration and further work and implications.
COLLABORATION: PROSUITE was a collaboration of 26 academic, SME and industry partners. Several partners are closely involved in consensus and development initiatives of the EC and UNEP/SETAC, which ensures the compatibility of PROSUITE methods and software outputs. The mixture of researchers’ working sector and expertise was important for the design and the implementation of the research within the project. The team among others involved sociologists, economists, environmental specialists, engineers and experts on the various technologies. An important element of PROSUITE was the fruitful collaboration between academic and industrial partners. The industrial partners supported the project by providing data, giving feedback to intermediate results, and allowing measurements and experiments at the plants. The academic partners did the analysis and discussed the results with the companies. The project furthermore comprised an advisory board including people from industry and academia. The advisory board was consulted several times in the course of the project to get their input and opinion on developed methods.
FURTHER WORK: In the upcoming period we will work on the further dissemination of the project through a number of activities:
Website: (1) Launch of a redesigned website end of November 2013 to ensure that also after the project is officially finalized all project finding are well displayed; (2) Actively communicate on the redesigned website and the display of results from the final project conference through Twitter, LinkedIn Update and news items on Email discussion lists.
Presentations: (1) Paris: 10 December: Andrea Ramirez will give presentation and discuss the PROSUITE aproach for a high level group of decision makers of bio surfactants and detergent manufacturers (CEN/TC-276) , (2) Give a presentation at a meeting of the Group Sustainability & LCA and CEN TC 411 - WG5 Sustainability & LCA. (3) Give a presentation at a meeting of the European Renewable Resources and Materials Association (RRM), (4) Submit a paper on the PROSUITE work for the CCS case study for the next International Conference on GHG Technologies in 2014 in Austin Texas.
DSS: (1) Berlin: January 22, 23 and 24 2014 training courses will be provided on usage of Open LCA including a full day dedicated to training on the PROSUITE methodology: http://www.openlca.org/registration2
Presentations: 6 presentations are currently being prepared.
FURTHER RESEARCH: The coordination and management team discussed a list of future research topics, these include: (1) further development of the QALY approach; (2) further development and extension of the normalisations factors for the various pillars; (3) developing guidelines for prospective assessment; (4) develop a method and collect data for the pillar on consumer health; (5) improve methods for integration and uncertainty assessment. On the short term we will continue research on these topic through assignments for MSc students at Utrecht University. For the longer term we are investigating possibilities for financing a follow up project (PROSUITE 2.0) e.g. within Horizon 2020.
List of Websites:
www.prosuite.org
SUSTAINABILITY: SEEKING TO BALANCE ECONOMIC, ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL GOAL.
Europe 2020 aims to foster "smart, sustainable, inclusive growth" in the European Union. Economic, environmental, and social goals are intertwined. Traditionally, public and private sector activities might give a high priority to just one or two families of goals. Today, we ask for “triple bottom line” accounting – success is measured not just in terms of sole economic gain, or of environmental protection, or of ethical correctness and the well-being of individuals and communities. There is growing awareness that we must take care of all these goals simultaneously. “Sustainability” has become a catchword. It has many definitions (for instance: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”; or “improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems”…). To ensure sustainability, we must find an appropriate, durable balance between the three families of goals.
SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT: CHECKING ECONOMIC, ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL PERFORMANCE.
A whole new set of tools must be developed to analyze activities and their consequences upon the economy, the environment, and society. The tools must be adequate for measuring these complex domains, as well as their interactions (like “rebound effects” that may take place when changes are made in one area). Performing such sustainability assessment should help point to better solutions – highlighting where performance should be improved, where corrections should be made, where wiser choices can lead to a preferred “triple bottom line” result. PROSUITE, a four-year (2009-2013) project funded in part by the European Commission, gathered scientists and industrialists in an effort to provide such new tools, for assessing new technologies in particular.
PROSUITE: COMPLETE SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF TECHNOLOGIES, TODAY AND TOMORROW
The European PROSUITE project has provided these tools by delivering a broad life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. The freely accessible tools are designed to support the actual sustainability decisions that product developers, policy makers and businesses are facing. They have been tested on four hot technologies: Biorefineries – producing energy from organic waste; Nanotechnology - in new textiles; Multifunctional mobile (telephone) devices - containing rare metals that should be recycled; Carbon storage and sequestration - to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and large-scale industrial sources. PROSUITE tools and concepts go beyond the traditional three pillars, in order to deliver even more detailed and meaningful results for decision makers. Today they can use the PROSUITE 5-pillar framework for assessment, which is supported by a freeware Decision Support System.
THE PROSUITE INNOVATION: A 5-PILLAR APPROACH
When sustainability is defined only on the traditional 3 pillars, existing assessments may be flawed by "overlaps". For instance, human health and income could be viewed as part of the social pillar, since both factors have a large influence on the quality of life of people – however, they also could be viewed as part of the economic pillar! To enable proper assessment, Prosuite developed an innovative framework that limits such overlapping and ensures that each pillar has a unique set of indicators. To achieve this goal, the resulting framework proposes five pillars: 1. IMPACT ON HUMAN HEALTH, 2. IMPACT ON SOCIAL WELL-BEING, 3. IMPACT ON PROSPERITY, 4. IMPACT ON NATURAL ENVIRONMENT, 5. IMPACT ON EXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCES.
Project Context and Objectives:
The Lisbon Strategy aims to make the European Union "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment by 2010”. This core statement shows the complexity of societal aspirations. Economic, environmental, and social goals are intertwined.
Traditionally, public and private sector activities might give a high priority to just one or two families of goals. Today, we ask for “triple bottom line” accounting – success is measured not just in terms of sole economic gain, or of environmental protection, or of ethical correctness and the wellbeing of individuals and communities. Today, there is growing awareness that we must take care of all these goals simultaneously.
A whole new set of tools must be developed to measure, analyze and assess activities and their consequences upon the economy, the environment, and society. The tools must be adequate to address the complexity of each of these domains, and also to capture their interactions. Performing such sustainability assessment should help point to better solutions – highlighting where performance should be improved, where corrections should be made, where wiser choices can lead to a preferred “triple bottom line” result. PROSUITE gathers scientists and industrialists in an effort to provide such new tools, for assessing new technologies in particular.
PROSUITE aimed to develop a coherent, scientifically sound methodology for the sustainability assessment of current and future technologies. It considered the whole life cycle (from a technology’s use of primary materials through to the production and handling of wastes). The PROSUITE tools can be applied to well-developed technologies, or to ones that are just emerging. To achieve this objective PROSUITE worked with stakeholders – small and medium enterprises (SMEs), large industries, regulators, and analysts – to be sure that the developed tools rely on shared, agreed and acceptable assumptions. Stakeholders helped too, to check that the tools are easy to apply and respond to their needs.
PROSUITE delivered actual sustainability estimates for 4 technology cases: Biorefineries, in which energy is produced from organic waste; Nanotechnology, focusing on nanoparticles in new textiles; Multifunctional mobile (telephone) devices, containing rare metals that should be recycled; Carbon storage and sequestration, as a technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and large-scale industrial sources.
Project Results:
SUMMARY: The project aimed to deliver a broad life cycle assessment (LCA) framework, taking into account the three pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental and social. We targeted an integrated methodology, one that would not just paste existing methodologies together, but instead support the actual holistic decisions that product developers, policy makers and businesses must perform. We also insisted on demonstrating the approach through case study assessments on four emergent technologies of varying scale. Our team included several individuals and organizations who have made important contributions already to LCA, and also dedicated young researchers who have brought new energies. Relying on the vast body of knowledge on assessments in all these areas, we have been able to make an important step forward.
In the four years of the project (2009-2013) we have innovated on all components of sustainability assessment, but especially in building an integrated approach, in terms of both concepts and practical tools. Prosuite proposes to go beyond the traditional three pillars, focusing instead on five major impact categories under which all primary impacts can be grouped. This resulted in a 5-pillar framework for assessment, which is supported by a freeware Decision Support System.
MEETING THE NEED: Technologies have always been the engine of progress and change. New technologies are developing continuously. Many have drastically changed our lives in the last decades and some have been controversial in terms of the net benefit they bring to society. The challenge is to know upfront, before the technologies are introduced, how sustainable they are. The term sustainability was introduced in 1987 in the context of efforts to reconcile the conflict between environmental protection and economic development. Nowadays it is widely accepted that sustainability should be defined along the three pillar social-environ- mental-economic, often referred to as people- planet-profit or the ‘triple bottom line’. The impact of technologies is often examined in terms of these three dimensions. Sustainability assessment of new technologies is important for many players in society, e.g. (1) for the public debate to assess alternative technology pathways, (2) for companies to decide on strategic investment decisions and (3) for policy makers to formulate and implement R&D and innovation policies.
Many initiatives aimed at assessing the sustainability of products and/or services have been developed over the years or are under development. These approaches have their merits but are not applicable in a generic way to all aspects of sustainability for a technology. What was missing was an objective assessment methodology to evaluate whether a technology helps to address important sustainability challenges or merely creates new ones. The Prosuite (Prospective SUstaInability assessment of TEchnologies) project was set up to fill this gap.
CLEARLY DEFINED PILLARS: When sustainability is defined in terms solely of social, environmental and economic dimensions there are overlaps, even to the extent that some impacts could largely include some of the others. For instance, human health and income could be viewed as contributors to the social pillar, since both factors have a large influence on the quality of life of people. They could alternatively be assigned to the economic pillar if both are cast in monetary terms. To be able to do a proper assessment, indicators should be chosen in such a way that there is no overlap and that together they represent all potential sustainability impacts. Prosuite developed a specific framework that limits this overlap and ensures that each pillar has a unique set of indicators. In fact, to achieve this goal, the resulting framework proposes five major impact categories under which all primary impacts can be distinctly grouped. These categories or pillars are:
1. Impact on Human Health
2. Impact on Social Well-being
3. Impact on Prosperity
4. Impact on Natural Environment
5. Impact on Exhaustible Resources.
A limiting factor of most current sustainability assessment methodologies is that there is no explicit definition of the cause-effect chain and no scientific and transparent calculation methodology. An exception to this is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which allows for the identification of trade-offs between different impacts as well as the shifting of burdens from one life cycle stage to another. A rigorous treatment of the cause-effect chain is followed in the impact assessment, which means that all impacts are calculated in the same way and go through the same steps. These useful elements were applied in the development of the new Prosuite approach. The result is a methodology that includes the strong points of LCA, but that also has many additional strong points. The new method provides a scientifically robust and reproducible framework capable of an overarching and comprehensive assessment of different impacts.
PILLAR #1 HUMAN HEALTH The Human Health category describes the impact of a technology on the health of human beings around the world. There are many factors that influence human health, such as food and water, the state of the physical environment in which the person lives, working conditions and of course dis- eases. Since every human being wishes to live a healthy life negative health impacts should be avoided. Technologies can have a negative health impact, which can be classified as work related (occupational health impacts), environment related (environmental human health impacts) and product consumption related (consumer health impacts). The impact on Human Health is expressed in ‘Disability Adjusted Life Years’ (DALY), which indicates the number of healthy life years that are lost due to sickness or disability and premature death. This concept combines information on the quality of life and life expectancy in one indicator, which is calculated as the sum of the ‘Years Lived with Disability’ (YLD) and the ‘Years of Life Lost’ (YLL). The Years Lived with Disability includes the duration of the disease or disability and a weighting factor that is determined by the severity of the disease or disability, ranging between 0 (complete health) to 1 (death). The DALY concept is well-established and for many types of diseases, disability weights have been established throughout the years.
Negative impact on human health can occur through different pathways, which are rep- resented in the methodology through three indicators: Occupational Health, Environmental Human Health and Consumer Health. Indicators contributing to the final impact on Human Health occur through very different pathways, creating the need for different approaches to be implemented in their impact assessment methods. The PROSUITE project specifically contributed to the further development of these methods by developing a new impact assessment methodology for Occupational Health (the work related health). The new methods quantifies the burden of disease per economic sector output. Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from the World Health Organization were therefore linked to employment and production data from the economic model. Seven types of occupational diseases were included, i.e. (1) cancer of the trachea, bronchus or lung; (2) leukemia; (3) asthma; (4) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); (5) noise-induced hearing loss (NHL); (6) low back pain (LBP); and (7) occupational injuries.
PILLAR #2 SOCIAL WELL-BEING: Treatment of social well-being is relatively new in the field of quantitative impact assessment at product and technology level. Prosuite has made one of the first attempts to develop a comprehensive method to measure the impact on social well-being with a life cycle perspective. The social impact assessment includes impacts on human well- being that are related to inter-human relationships. This includes a broad range of path- ways that affect the quality of life of people on both an individual and a collective basis.
The method developed within PROSUITE groups the impacts on social well-being in four categories:
(1) Autonomy: ‘being in control of oneself and one’s resources’. Autonomy is negatively impacted by for example, forced labour or slavery
(2) Safety, Security and Tranquillity: as a combination of ‘freedom from threats to personal health (Safety)’, ‘freedom from threats to personal property (Security)’ and ‘freedom from excessive stress (Tranquillity)’. Safety, Security and Tranquillity are for example negatively impacted by unemployment.
(3) Equality: representing the level of disparity among countries and regions. Equality is for example negatively impacted by increasing disparity in income distribution.
(4) Participation and Influence: ‘the act of taking part or sharing in something and affecting the course of events’.
There are many possible indicators to address impacts of a technology on Social Well-being. Prosuite selected eleven indicators (6 quantitative and 5 qualitative) as most relevant for the technologies considered in the project. This set is by no means exhaustive and can later be expanded as soon as primary impacts are identified that are relevant for other technologies. The quantitative indicators include:
• Knowledge-intensive Jobs, refers to the effect of the prospective technology on the amount of highly-skilled employment. The indicator is used together with the indicator on total employment as a proxy for the value of employment in society.
• Total Employment, refers to the total employment caused by the introduction of the prospective technology. Total Employment is the working share of the labour force (the overall part of society that is available for work).
• Regional Income Inequalities, refers to the degree to which regional income inequalities are affected by the introduction of the prospective technology. Regional Income Inequalities are structural disparities between salary levels, which represent the gap between the rich and poor within a region.
• Global Income Inequalities, refers to the degree to which global income inequalities are affected by the introduction of the novel technology. Global Income Inequalities regard the disparities between GDP levels around the world.
• Child Labour, refers to the change in the number of children working in hazardous forms of child labour caused by the intro- duction of the prospective technology. Child Labour is defined by the number of children under legal age who perform hazardous work with companies active in the supply chain of the technology.
• Forced Labour, refers to the forced labour caused by the introduction of the novel technology. Forced Labour is all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and not undertaken voluntarily by the person.
The qualitative indicators include:
• Risk Perception, refers to the potential public resistance with regard to the introduction of the prospective technology. Change in Risk Perception is the difference between the attribution by the general public of hazard due to the introduction of the new technology compared to the reference technology.
• Possibility of Misuse, refers to the potential to misuse a technology so that it harms people or the environment. Although possibility of misuse is related to not only the technology characteristics but also the intention of the user, in Prosuite only the former is currently assessed, by linking Possibility of Misuse to change in asset vulnerability.
• Trust in Risk Information, refers to the confidence that one will be informed in case of hazard due to the introduction of the prospective technology.
• Stakeholder Involvement, refers to the degree to which the interested parties are involved in decision-making processes concerning the prospective technology, and the quality and intensity of these participation procedures.
• Long-term Control Functions, refers to the degree to which people trust that the technology is adequately controlled. Long term Control Functions are governance or technical instruments such as regulating authorities or systems that ensure long- term control.
Six of the indicators are quantitative and can be assessed using tools available in the Open source decision support system. The remaining five are qualitative indicators and need to be mapped using expert elicitation. The project resulted in a Practical Guidance Document for Social Assessment including recommended methods to use and complement expert elicitation and guidance on how to interpret results. In contrast to the environmental domain, where the desired direction for each indicator is clear (minimize the impact of a sub- stance in the environment) and the magnitude is based on absolute quantities, social indicators are more complex as incommensurable data need to be combined and the desired direction of the indicators changes (e.g. to increase Social Well-being we would like to decrease child labour but we would like to increase employment). Besides PROSUITE develop a method to aggregate the quantitative indicators in order to come to one overall quantitative score for the impact on Social Well-being.
As already indicated the Prosuite methodology represents one of the first attempts to develop a comprehensive and quantitative method to measure impact on social well- being. Further improvement is expected, for example regarding developing a method that allows measurement of indicators in the unit ‘Well-being Adjusted Life Years’. This indicator, comparable to the DALY measure for human health, would express the years of well-being that are lost compared to an ideal state of uncompromised social well-being. Further research is needed to determine the incidence and duration of the social impacts on a person and the weight factors that indicate the degree to which certain impacts influence Social Well-being
PILLAR #3 PROSPERITY: Technological innovation is universally accepted to be an important source for economic growth. The impact category Prosperity focuses on the potential impact of technologies on affluence. The economic impact of a technology/product can be linked to a change in the added value created by introducing the new technology, measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is a generally accepted and widely avail- able measure for prosperity. Gross Domestic Product allows us to express the economic impact of new technologies in monetary terms. The Prosperity assessment consists of two steps: (1) the micro assessment to gain insight into all the expenditures related to the technology and (2) the macro assessment to gain insight into how these expenditures influence macro level impacts (Labour, Capital and Resource Productivity and ultimately Gross Domestic Product).
The micro economic assessment includes a careful and precise assessment of all costs related to a technology. The methodology developed within PROSUITE uses the factorial approach in which cost components are estimated using factors and percentages based on purchased equipment costs, geared towards chemical plants. This approach can be realized using a limited amount of data, namely a list of equipment required for the technology. Therefore it is especially practical for the assessment of new or emerging technologies. A model (SCENT tool) to perform the micro analysis is included in the Prosuite DSS. Formulas have been included to estimate the costs at the right functional unit and capacity level. The database solely focuses on chemical data, the micro assessment tool in the DSS is therefore not applicable for non-chemical plants. Assessments for technologies or products outside the chemical sector therefore require a separate manual calculation of micro costs using the same formulas, which are listed in a report “Recommended methodology and tool for cost estimates at micro level for new technologies available in the Prosuite online library”
The macro analysis aims to give insight into the impacts of a technology on the economy when it has fully penetrated the market. It aims to answer the question whether a technology has a macro-economic impact. More precisely: does the selection of a specific technology lead to additional economic growth that would not happen if one had invested in a different technology/sector instead? The macro analysis within PROSUITE is conducted with the model THEMIS. THEMIS is a hybrid input-output model, developed from the EXIOPOL database with related projects for the Prosperity impact category.
An important step in the macro assessment is a market analysis to estimate the potential market volume. This requires a survey or another form of market research. Estimation of the market is necessary because environmental, economic and social aspects become relevant or apparent only if the technology reaches and exceeds a certain level of implementation. Investigating the impact of technology through only the functional unit ignores this aspect, so analysis must occur at full-scale implementation. It’s only then that resource constraints or resource conflicts, macro-economic effects and social tensions can become apparent. An estimate of the macro-impact of a technology hence requires the estimation of the production volume of the technology output. For this aim the PROSUITE project refined and tested a diffusion module, in which a vintage capital model has been implemented under a S-shaped diffusion curve, also taking into account consumer preference.
PILLAR #4 NATURAL ENVIRONMENT: The impact category Natural Environment describes the impact of technologies on the natural ecosystems around the world3. Negative impacts on ecosystems -can occur as a consequence of exposure to chemicals, biological and physical interventions such as cutting wood or mining. Essentially the category Natural Environment aims to provide insight into change to and loss of species richness. The impact on Natural Environment is expressed as the potential number of species disappearing over time. The unit for this is species*year, which can be interpreted as the number of species that has a high probability of no occurrence in a region, due to unfavourable conditions, integrated over time.
The analysis of the impact on Natural Environment focuses on the negative impacts on freshwater, marine and terrestrial (land) ecosystems, though some contributors affect all three (see figure 12). The negative impacts can be caused by several contributors such as land use, acidification and cli- mate change. The impact of each contributor on the natural environment is calculated to get insight into the total impact on the natural environment. Since impact on Natural Environment has been explored thoroughly in the past, many LCIA methods are already available. The impact assessment methods recommended in the ILCD handbook were used as the primary basis for method selection by Prosuite. The ILCD handbook methods are viewed as the best alternatives for each specific impact category available at its time of publication, such as climate change and terrestrial ecotoxicity. For other categories, Prosuite retained newly released methods from the LC-IMPACT project. These updates were developed in light of the the ILCD handbook suggestions for improvement, and were thus identified by Prosuite as the new best available methods
PILLAR #5 EXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCES: The major impact category Exhaustible Resources concerns the removal of resources from the earth, whether this is for the production of fuel or as a raw material. The category encompasses only abiotic non-renewable resources, which are non-liv-resources will be available for future generations. Furthermore, the most accessible stock is usually recovered first, meaning that future generations will need more effort to reach the following stock available. Both the reduced availability and increased difficulty to reach future stock will result in a resource shortage and increased resource costs. The impact on Exhaustible Resources is expressed in US dollars. This indicates the expected cost increase caused by the extraction of resources now
Impact on Exhaustible Resources has been explored thoroughly in the past, so several impact assessment methods were already available. The ILCD handbook analyzed existing impact assessment methods and found a number of weaknesses in the methods for Exhaustible Resources. Taking account of these weaknesses new methods were developed by the LC-IMPACT project. These new methods are more scientifically robust and reliable than previous methods, and are thus recommended for the sustainability assessment of technologies.
AGGREGATION: The ambition of the sustainability assessment of technologies is to enable:
• Comparison of the sustainability impacts of alternative technologies to provide a given service
• Support for the development of sustainability policies (e.g. product policy, technology action plans)
• Strategic decision making in companies.
An aggregate sustainability impact end score alone would not fully serve such goals - underlying values are very relevant as well. Many important insights spring from examination of the contributors, such as impact on labour productivity, occupational health or land use, etc. Still the Prosuite methodology allows the practitioner to obtain an end score by going through the steps of optional weighting and then, weighted aggregation.
STEP A: NORMALISATION: For this aim a set of Normalisation factors was developed for each of the 5 impact categories. Normalisation is a procedure needed to show to what extent an impact category has a significant contribution to the overall sustainability outcome. This is done by dividing the impact category indicators by a “reference” value. There are different ways to determine the “reference” value. The most common procedure is to determine the impact category indicators for a region during a year and, if desired, divide this result by the number of inhabitants in that area. The impact of the product under study can then be compared to the impact of an average inhabitant of a region in a year. The normalised results show the order of magnitude of the problems generated by the product’s life cycle, compared to the total sustainability loads in Europe.
STEP B:WEIGHTING is a step needed to further aggregated normalised values into a single sustainability score. To aggregate to one score a weight is assigned to each major impact category. This weight indicates the relative importance of a given category that is attributed by the assessor or evaluator. Weighting is the most controversial step in life cycle impact assessment, as in fine it is a subjective value-based judgment. Nevertheless, in order to contribute to the transparency and founded basis of such subjective evaluations, a set of “examples of weighting factors” is provided in Prosuite regarding the five major impact categories of the methodology. These weighting factors were developed through workshops with interested parties of various nationalities. This among other resulted in a report on how to obtain weighting factors for PROSUITE impact categories.
STEP C: AGGREGATION: There are several methodologies that can be used to aggregate indicators. In Prosuite two are recommended: aggregation to weighted sum and outranking analysis. PROSUITE recommends that the user uses both aggregation methods and assesses the results together with the graphical display and supplementary information (e.g. results of the qualitative indicators in the social assessment) before drawing a conclusion on the sustainability of the technology under study.
CASE STUDIES: PROSUITE delivered actual sustainability estimates for 4 technology cases, with close consultation of the stakeholders involved. The four emergent (new) technologies were selected for study because (i) they have the potential for large-scale implementation, (ii) they will generate products or services with medium to high value added, (iii) they involve innovative processes, and (iv) they show large potential impacts on several economic sectors.
The cases are: BIOREFINERIES – technology to produce energy from organic waste; NANOTECHNOLOGY focusing on nanoparticles in new textiles; MULTIFUNCTIONAL MOBILE (telephone) devices containing rare metals that should be recycled; CARBON STORAGE AND SEQUESTRATION as a technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and large-scale industrial sources. The case studies were used to: test the new assessment framework and methods developed within PROSUITE and to test the DSS. Results of the impact assessments are laid down in 4 public deliverables and a large number of scientific journals that can be downloaded from the PROSUITE website.
DECISSION SUPPORT SYSTEM: All methods and tools developed within PROSUITE are integrated into a decision support system that is developed on the existing basis of openLCA. OpenLCA is an open source software originated and maintained by Prosuite partner GreenDelta. It can be freely downloaded from the openLCA website.
Potential Impact:
The PROSUITE project use(d) a range of tools and channels to communicate on the finding of our project results but also to collect input from the stakeholders on their needs and wishes.
WEBSITE: The project website was set up at the start of the project and launched in March 2010 (www.prosuite.org). A wiki space has been promoted as a platform for sharing document, and is being used as such. Substantial updates of the website have been made regularly and throughout the project duration to commensurate with the evolution of the PROSUITE project and the project results. A new update (4th update) was implemented and went live by end of November 2013. This lasts update was implemented to ensure good display of all project finding, also after the project has officially finished.
The website was used to: (1) promote PROSUITE events (workshop and stakeholder events) and inform the public on the outcome of these events; (2) provide an overview and inform the public on release of new deliverables and (journal) publications; (3) provide a calendar on gatherings (conferences, symposia, workshops and working group meeting) were the project team member presented findings on the project; (4) 7display web lectures and video’s; (5) provide a platform for the users of the DSS, including web-based tutorials.
Web statistics show that the number of visits was limited in the first 1-2 years of the project but has increased significantly as a result of various website updates and more active communication of the project results. Up to end of November we had almost 7,500 unique visitors and 63% new visitors.
PUBLICATIONS: In total 35 public deliverables were produced during the course of the project (in accordance with the DoW). Besides 5 additional deliverables were produced and published on the website and uploaded to SESAM. Release of finalized deliverables was actively communicated through news items on the website, the newsletters and tweets.
The project team has been very active in publishing the project finding in scientific journals. In total 45 articles have been published or submitted to scientific journals up to November 2013, with the majority of the papers published or submitted in the final year of the project (Figure 6). Six papers are under preparation and will be submitted next year, besides several more are being planned for publication.
PRESENTATIONS: Team members presented the project results at various conferences, workshops and other meetings were the target group for our project was present. Over the course of the project 43 presentations were held: (1) Type of audience varied from the scientific community, specialized industrial groups and policy makers. Because of the novelty of the topic, focus was on the scientific audiences and experts in the field of sustainability assessment; (2) Size of the audience at conferences and meeting varied from 50 to 2500 participants, (3) Majority (almost 70%) of the conferences where Prosuite results were presented attracted a worldwide audience, 20% a pure European audience, and 10% a national audience, and most of the partners were active in disseminating project finding through presentations.
WORKSHOPS/STAKEHOLDER EVENST/CONFERENCES: Workshops, stakeholder consultations and conferences have been ongoing throughout the project lifetime. In total 15 workshops and stakeholder meetings (organized as stand-alone workshops or as side events at conferences) were carried out over the course of the project, with most activities taking place as foreseen principally in the last two years of the project. The number of participants ranged from 7 to 80, and the average number of participants was 24. Through these events we have been able to reach a broad group of stakeholders in Europe, active in various industry sectors and government levels.
Over 80 participants from across Europe and beyond attended the Final PROSUITE conference under the chairmanship of Mr. Michele GALATOLA (coordinator of the EU Ecolabel – DG Environment; original Scientific Officer for PROSUITE). A wide audience of policy makers, industrial actors, consultants and academics took this opportunity to learn about our novel framework and tools for the sustainability impact assessment of new technologies, to witness the case study assessments and also to receive the handbook which accompanied our decision support system. Thanks to the Final Project Conference, new partnerships have been launched that presage further development of the PROSUITE DSS and applications, including reinforcement of the onboard databases, which at term should render the tools and the LCSA approach overall more accessible to SMEs.
NEWSLETTERS: Six Newsletters have been released during the project life time. In the course of the 4 year project we have been able to create a substantial growth of our audiences for the Newsletter. During the release of the first 4 newsletters our database included 225 contacts. In the last 2 years of the project we have extended the database to 800 contacts. However, a much larger larger audience was reached with our Newsletter as all project team members were urged to forward the Newsletter to their personal contact and Newsletters were posted to various email listing and discussion groups: (1) LCA Discussion list moderated by Pre Consultant (2500 subscriptions), (2) JRC Life Cycle Thinking and Assessment Email list, (3) Mailing list at University of Barcelona, (4) LinkedIn Life Cycle Assessment group (3846 members)
WEB BASED TUTORIAL AND VIDEO’S: The website holds web-based tutorial and video’s aimed at (1) communicating the PROSUITE finding towards a broader audience, (2) teasing visitors to further dive into the results produced by the project. Through these web based tutorials and video’s we have open up a whole new communications channels that was not foreseen in the DoW.
TWITTER/LINKEDIN UPDATES: Twitter is deployed by the Coordinator as an additional dissemination channel and systematically announces our newsletter releases. 58 Tweets have been sent out since the beginning of the project. Various team member have posted updated on the PROSUITE project on their LinkedIn profile.
HANDBOOK: A “Handbook on a Novel methodology for the sustainability impact assessment of new technologies” was produced in the final year of the project. This Handbook provides a compact overview on the PROSUITE framework and the indicators and the approaches taken for each of the five PROSUITE pillars. The 60 pages booklet was produced with an attractive design and hardcopies were first distributed during the final conference in Brussels. The updated digital version of the Handbook has a prominent place on the homepage of the PROSUITE website.
With respect to the wider social implications we like to highlight Collaboration and further work and implications.
COLLABORATION: PROSUITE was a collaboration of 26 academic, SME and industry partners. Several partners are closely involved in consensus and development initiatives of the EC and UNEP/SETAC, which ensures the compatibility of PROSUITE methods and software outputs. The mixture of researchers’ working sector and expertise was important for the design and the implementation of the research within the project. The team among others involved sociologists, economists, environmental specialists, engineers and experts on the various technologies. An important element of PROSUITE was the fruitful collaboration between academic and industrial partners. The industrial partners supported the project by providing data, giving feedback to intermediate results, and allowing measurements and experiments at the plants. The academic partners did the analysis and discussed the results with the companies. The project furthermore comprised an advisory board including people from industry and academia. The advisory board was consulted several times in the course of the project to get their input and opinion on developed methods.
FURTHER WORK: In the upcoming period we will work on the further dissemination of the project through a number of activities:
Website: (1) Launch of a redesigned website end of November 2013 to ensure that also after the project is officially finalized all project finding are well displayed; (2) Actively communicate on the redesigned website and the display of results from the final project conference through Twitter, LinkedIn Update and news items on Email discussion lists.
Presentations: (1) Paris: 10 December: Andrea Ramirez will give presentation and discuss the PROSUITE aproach for a high level group of decision makers of bio surfactants and detergent manufacturers (CEN/TC-276) , (2) Give a presentation at a meeting of the Group Sustainability & LCA and CEN TC 411 - WG5 Sustainability & LCA. (3) Give a presentation at a meeting of the European Renewable Resources and Materials Association (RRM), (4) Submit a paper on the PROSUITE work for the CCS case study for the next International Conference on GHG Technologies in 2014 in Austin Texas.
DSS: (1) Berlin: January 22, 23 and 24 2014 training courses will be provided on usage of Open LCA including a full day dedicated to training on the PROSUITE methodology: http://www.openlca.org/registration2
Presentations: 6 presentations are currently being prepared.
FURTHER RESEARCH: The coordination and management team discussed a list of future research topics, these include: (1) further development of the QALY approach; (2) further development and extension of the normalisations factors for the various pillars; (3) developing guidelines for prospective assessment; (4) develop a method and collect data for the pillar on consumer health; (5) improve methods for integration and uncertainty assessment. On the short term we will continue research on these topic through assignments for MSc students at Utrecht University. For the longer term we are investigating possibilities for financing a follow up project (PROSUITE 2.0) e.g. within Horizon 2020.
List of Websites:
www.prosuite.org
