Advanced Sustainability Assessment & LCA: Dynamic Biogenic Carbon Accounting

Although life cycle assessment (LCA) has a well-established framework (i.e. ISO 14040), the sustainability assessment of the bio-based products even with the commercial software is still not straightforward. This is mainly due to the complexity of the time dynamics of biogenic carbon. Neglecting time dynamics of biogenic carbon might result in an inaccurate conclusion that carbon neutrality equals climate neutrality for all type of biobased products. To address this issue, the new framework of Biobased Materials and products-Life Cycle Assessment (BBM-LCA) has been developed at Aachen-Maastricht Institute for Biobased Materials (AMIBM), Faculty of Science and Engineering, Maastricht University, The Netherlands.

We have already applied BBM-LCA to various end-of-life options including chemical recycling, mechanical recycling, composting, anaerobic digestion, and incineration of a bioplastic, which has been published at Wiley - Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining. BBM-LCA accounts for the carbon sequestration benefits of recycling, recognizing its actual impact over time in multiple lifecycles. This feature makes BBM-LCA preferable over conventional LCA, which struggles to track greenhouse gas emissions at different points over multiple years across the multiple lifecycles of recycled products.