Life Cycle Assessment Explained: Key to Sustainable and Circular Chemical Production

Today, 90% of chemicals are produced from fossil-based feedstocks in a linear “take-make-waste” model. This method of production causes problems and contributes to global challenges such as climate change, chemical pollution and biodiversity loss, said Dr. Polina Yaseneva, a lecturer in sustainability and life cycle assessment at University College London.

An alternative to the take-make-waste model is the circular economy, which aims to minimize waste, reduce resource use and build a closed-loop system where by-products from one process become feedstock for another.

Our latest webinar in the Sustainability in Action series, Designing Green: Leveraging Life Cycle Assessment for Sustainable Chemistry, explores how Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) supports sustainable chemistry and a circular economy by offering real-world strategies for reducing environmental impact across the chemical value chain.

The webinar is presented by Polina and moderated by Chris Cogswell, Engineering Solutions Global Consultant at Elsevier.

From linear to circular

“There is a high incentive to switch to a circular manufacturing model. This means that we’re looking more at renewable feedstocks for chemical production and we need to think about the end of life of chemicals,” Polina said. Renewable feedstocks in this context include bio-based inputs, captured carbon dioxidefrom industrial emissions or the atmosphere and post-consumer or post-industrial recycled materials.

End-of-life strategies are equally critical to closing the loop and include carbon capture from incineration, chemical and mechanical recycling technologies, and designing inherently biodegradable or compostable compounds.

“The transition to this circular manufacturing model would imply quite a significant change in technology,” Polina said, outlining several critical considerations, including:

• Developing new chemical reactions

• Supporting technologies for new chemistry

• Integrating new processes with old manufacturing methods

• Building new business models and supply chains

“And on top of this, chemical production systems are often highly complex and offer multiple choices for the production of the same molecule. For example, the use of different feedstocks or different pathways of production,” Polina added.

Another major challenge is the speed of this transition. Widespread adoption of circular economy principles in industry is often hindered by systemic barriers and resistance, which can slow the transition.

LCA in the move toward circularity

“To support this transition, we use Life Cycle Assessment as the most comprehensive tool to assess a production system’s environmental sustainability,” Polina said.

Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, measures the environmental impact of a product or service throughout its lifecycle. The methodology behind LCA is defined by international standards (ISO 14040 and ISO 14044) and also serves as a foundational assessment framework in several regulatory contexts.

“The use of LCA-based methods in the industry is driven by developing policies. For example, the European Green Deal uses LCA in its package of transition to a circular economy. There’s a specific chemical strategy for sustainability and LCA is used to develop this package,” Polina explained.

The European Green Deal is the EU’s overarching strategy for achieving climate neutrality by 2050. Within this framework, LCA plays a key role in shaping product policies and environmental performance metrics. For the chemical sector, this includes integrating LCA into the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, which seeks to promote safer, more sustainable substances and processes across their entire lifecycle.

“It’s also a framework aimed at improving environmental performance through the lifecycle,” said Polina, referring to the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, adopted in 2024. The regulation expands the EU’s ecodesign framework beyond energy-related products to virtually all physical goods on the EU market.

It requires manufacturers to assess and optimize products based on durability, reparability, recyclability, and environmental impact using LCA-based criteria. The regulation introduces legally binding sustainability requirements and serves as a foundation for implementing Digital Product Passports (DPP) across product categories.

Challenges of LCA in practical applications

Polina outlined several challenges organizations face when it comes to widespread LCA application:

• Data availability and transparency

• Harmonization of LCA approaches

• Resource intensity of LCA

This echoes our webinar poll participants' answers, with 50% citing lack of internal expertise or dedicated resources as the largest barrier, while incomplete or low-quality data came in second at 33%.

The solution? Digitalization, according to Polina. She outlined three ways digitalization can help organizations overcome the challenges of applying an LCA:

• On a company level: Digital twins and digital representations of the product process as a prerequisite for virtualization of supply chains.

• On a data exchange level: The development and use of a safe and transparent data sharing infrastructure.

• For prediction: The use of AI in the search for more sustainable and safe chemistries and manufacturing.

Case study: LCA for the nanocellulose market

“Nanocellulose has been studied for use in multiple industries, such as pharmaceuticals, paper production, cosmetics, energy and so on. Really, the possible applications of nanocellulose are quite diverse,” Polina said.

Although the global nanocellulose market is projected to grow to $3 billion by 2033, the industry still faces several barriers when it comes to unlocking nanocellulose markets:

• Uncertainties about the environmental impacts

• Future impact predictions and development policies

• Data sharing models

• Feedstock availability

• Cost analysis

Polina presented ongoing research focused on tackling these barriers based on an LCA application of cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) manufacturing.

“Our aim was to reproduce an industrially relevant process to quantify a benchmark for the production of cellulose nanocrystals,” Polina said. She, along with Dr. Zhimian Hao and several collaborators, looked at the impact of recycling and neutralization of the acidic waste stream in the process of acid hydrolysis of kraft pulp.

Creating frameworks for both processes allowed the team to identify several hot spots, environmental tradeoffs and hidden factors that would impact strategic decision-making.

Polina shared an overview of the entire process step-by-step, including identifying environmental sustainability objectives, considering alternative production routes and mapping out technologies.