2.16 Sustainable Materials Concepts for Engineers

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA)

LCA is the process of evaluating the effects that a product has on the environment over the entire period of it’s life cycle- it covers all processes required: extraction, processing, manufacture, distribution, use, reuse, maintenance, and disposal. It could be called a “Cradle to Grave” approach

LCA can be a useful tool to consider the environmental impacts of engineering projects. It's key features are that it is product orientated, as most industrial activity evolves around products. It is also holistic and integrative in that it integrates all the problems to avoid problem shifting. It is a quantitative tool based on scientific data and provides useful information for decision making with environmental consequences.

Image sourced from MIT opencourseware under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/39134/1-964Fall-2004/NR/rdonlyres/Civil-and-Environmental-Engineering/1-964Fall-2004/C31B4488-55CE-461E-B18F-FCBECAA4A5EA/0/lec2_construction.pdf

Industrial Ecology

Industrial ecology is the means by which humanity can deliberately and rationally approach and maintain a desirable carrying capacity, given continued economic, cultural, and technological evolution. The concept requires that an industrial system be viewed not in isolation from its surrounding systems, but in concert with them. It is a systems view in which one seeks to optimize the total materials cycle from virgin material, to finished material, to component, to product, to obsolete product, and to ultimate disposal. Factors to be optimized include resources, energy, and capital.

Source: MIT Opencourseware [see reference 3]

Image sourced from MIT opencourseware under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/39134/1-964Fall-2004/NR/rdonlyres/Civil-and-Environmental-Engineering/1-964Fall-2004/C31B4488-55CE-461E-B18F-FCBECAA4A5EA/0/lec2_construction.pdf

The above concepts have all come about from the inherent problems associated with material use and disposal in industrial systems. They are all different ways of providing and alternative to the current system of design a product, sell it, throw it away. These ideas are not relatively new in the engineering world, but are still not widely implemented