Bridging the Gap from Pilot Plant Experimental Records to Life Cycle Inventory

Conducting life cycle assessment (LCA) at pilot-scale can help chemical and pharmaceutical industries to generate environmental load data, identify environmental hotspots, and provide options for building sustainable manufacturing plants from the process design and development stage. However, collecting life cycle inventory (LCI) data is time intensive and may be arduous for process development. In this paper, a systematic methodology was developed to bridge quickly the gaps between pilot plant operation and LCI and, also, scale up to predict LCI at industrial scale. According to the ISO 14040 series of standards for LCA, the methodology classifies various data-available scenarios and integrates experimental measurements with engineering and empirical calculations to provide suitable data for LCI. This methodology builds a reliable, convenient, and easy to follow basis, which enables industrial process developers to gain a much clearer view of the environmental footprint at the process design stage, there...