New technologies offer many benefits to society, with some of them even promising to lessen our environmental impact.  The reality is, however, that many have unintended environmental consequences, especially when a life cycle assessment is performed on the technology.  Such assessments are often only performed when a technology is relatively mature however, rather than when it’s emerging.

A new paper attempts to address this issue, and explores how life cycle assessment can be performed on emerging technologies.  For instance, the potential environmental impact of the increase in production of lithium-ion battery packs is highlighted as a particular risk.  The paper suggests that the production of these batteries is likely to continue for another few decades, but the localized environmental impact of extracting and processing the lithium-ion has the potential to create significant geographic imbalances in terms of environmental impact.

Comparative assessment

The paper also describes new approaches to the comparative assessment of the technologies emerging in the energy space.  The new approach especially emphasizes the demise of the single-technology approach, and explores the environmental impact of alternative energy futures for sources such as hydrogen, off-shore wind and solar.

“The research in this issue advances not only the understanding and methods for the environmental assessment of novel technologies, italso shows the potential for refashioning the tools of systematic environmental assessment to apply at the earliest stages of the innovation cycle,” the authors say.

The paper also describes the creation of a life cycle assessment database that can be aligned with numerous scenarios used with integrated assessment models, which are commonly used in climate change modeling.  By using the technology readiness levels utilized by the R&D management domain, it allows the connection of life cycle assessments to other complementary tools, such as risk analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis and techno-economic analysis.  This should result in a better understanding of the impact of new technologies on people and the planet.