Holistic Life Cycle Thinking for Sustainable Product Design and Technology

Given the ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and the Sustainable Development Goals in the European Union, there is an increasing need to analyse the environmental impact with a life cycle approach. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a leading method for environmental metrics for intensively investigating the lifecycle of products and technologies over the last few years. This research topic allows an extensive environmental and energetic evaluation of the lifecycle stage of products and technological processes by new holistic approaches. The shift from life cycle assessment to sustainable product design and a circular economy significantly benefits all industries. These benefits include improving the security of supply of raw materials, designing and implementing production processes, increasing competitiveness, stimulating innovation, and boosting sales. The topic aims to showcase sustainable products and technologies driven by sustainability. Today, we have started the journey, embedding sustainability, the circular economy, and the cradle-to-grave life cycle approach based on the 10-R strategy into all our processes and thinking, focusing on cost and energy efficiency. The publications to be presented are key ones where the 9Rs framework and the circular economy objectives are integrated in cradle-to-grave life cycle assessments.• Literature review summaries on the given topic.• Life Cycle Inventory of the product and technologies.• Environmental Life Cycle Impact Assessment of the product and technologies.• Investigate the energetic efficiency at the production, use and end-of-life stages.• Cradle-to-gate and cradle-to-grave life cycle assessments.• Design complex LCA models to compare the environmental loads.• Evaluation and comparison of numerical and analytical results.• Determine hotspots and intervention areas to compare conventional and renewable systems. • Integration of LCA with other approaches such as 10-R strategies, Circular Economy, statistical and mathematical methods. Topic editors: Viktoria Mannheim, Judit Lovasné Avató, Weronika Kruszelnicka, Mohamed Alwaeli Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/71226/holistic-life-cycle-thinking-for-sustainable-product-design-and-technology