Life Cycle Assessment of Biomass-Derived Resin for Sustainable Chemical Industry

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a strong tool for quantifying the environmental impact associated with a product life cycle. To implement LCA into process design of biomass-derived resin, the lack of inventory data should be addressed by computer-aided process engineering (CAPE) tools. This study proposes the procedure of life cycle system design of biomass-derived resin. In this procedure, missing inventory data can be estimated by process simulation with design information extracted from literatures and design heuristics. at this time, the sensitivity of design settings to LCA results is analyzed and considered in process analysis. The categories of environmental impacts are specified on the scenarios definition originating from the decision by other stakeholders in the life cycle. This study demonstrates the proposed procedure by a case study of biomass-derived polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP). At the case of synthesizing PP through synthesis gas from biomass, resin production phase has the largest contribution to the total GHG emission. In the case study, it is demonstrated that the detailed design of unit operation can lead to the increase of environmental impact by substituting biomass for fossil resources as raw material.