Environmental assessment, LCA and A2C circularity monitoring (Final): Deliverable 7.7

In this LCA (life cycle assessment) study, the environmental impacts of the Agro2Circular (A2C) agrifood, plastic package waste and agriculture film upcycling solution are calculated together with creating a circularity monitoring framework for selected agrifood and plastic cases. The LCA has two primary goals: identifying the most relevant process improvements for future technology development through hotspot analysis, and to benchmark the environmental performance of the A2C circular solution to a functionally equivalent linear solution. The purpose of combining benchmarking and hotspot analysis is to identify what are the aspects of the novel A2C system which need to be possibly improved to reach the levels of sustainability as the more developed benchmark products.

The main contributors to the environmental impact of the A2C solution are electricity consumption and production of the used chemicals. In the agrifood chain, the hotpots are the electricity consumptions of demo 5 process fermentation and demo 2c processes yeast fermentation and solvent evaporation. The impact of manufacturing the used chemicals is significant in demos 5, 6 and 8. In the plastic waste system, the electricity consumption of the demo 2b dominates the results. These hotspots are explained by the less developed technology of the A2C solution compared to the industrially optimized processes found in the linear benchmark system.

A sensitivity analysis is conducted to test how selected modelling assumptions impact the environmental performance of the A2C solution. The tested assumptions are application of renewable electricity and local watershed scarcity factors for water use impact category in the A2C solution. Additionally, the impact of the avoided waste treatment emissions caused by directing the waste to A2C upcycling processes instead of waste treatment is studied. This impact is evaluated by benchmarking the A2C solution’s environmental impact against the linear benchmark system because the avoided waste treatment emissions are added to the benchmark system.

The results of the renewable electricity sensitivity assessment show that the environmental impact of the agrifood waste system with renewable electricity is decreases 41 % and plastic waste system 73 % (excluding the demos 2 a and b from the assessment) when wind electricity is applied instead of market electricity. Contrarily, applying local watershed factor in the impact category water use showed negligible impact to the overall environmental footprint of both agrifood and plastic waste system. The impact of the avoided waste treatment emission has a negligible impact to the difference of the environmental performance of the agrifood system and plastic system including all demos. The sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the results of presented in this deliverable can be considered as robust.

The LCA results indicate that currently, when all the demonstrators with different TRL levels are included in the assessment and the benchmark system is modelled using industrial-level data, the A2C agrifood and plastic waste system are not yet more environmentally sustainable than the linear benchmark systems. The agrifood waste system’s environmental impact is 3 times higher than the linear benchmark system’s and the plastic waste system’s impact is 23 times higher. It should be noted that in the plastic waste system, the life cycle stages which contribute the most to the result (production of PCA from TPA and GA from
EG) are modelled using laboratory scale data. Also, the agrifood system contains partly laboratory-scale data. Simultaneously, the benchmark systems represent more industrial level processes which are typically more efficient in energy and chemical use and yields. If these two life cycle stages are subtracted from the results in order to be able to investigate the plastic waste system better, the environmental impact of the plastic waste system is 49 % smaller than the linear benchmark systems.

Even if the A2C agrifood results were higher than of the compared benchmarks, they are in quite the same scale, and with improvements the same level can be reached. The whole plastic waste system’s environmental impact compared to the benchmark can only be evaluated when more upscaled data is available. The novel circularity monitoring framework outlined in this deliverable provides a step-by step guide, distinguishing between intrinsic and impact-related metrics. Applying this framework to the A2C case study shows that following these steps can efficiently identify crucial elements in case-specific circular economy monitoring and improve the alignment of circularity assessment with impact-based methods like LCA. This study resulted in a list of recommended circularity monitoring metrics, offering a practical approach for A2C demo practitioners to evaluate the development and impact of their activities related to the circular economy.