Dynamic Carbon Footprint For The Full Life Cycle With A Temporal Inventory Database (DyPLCA) – Tailoring & Application To Biobased Circular Systems

Global concerns about climate change and its impacts induced by greenhouse gas emissions and processes make it crucial to understand its evolution over time. This is particularly relevant for biobased systems, which take up CO2 during biomass growth, of which a part remains stored during the life cycle of products (considering possible recycling, reuse etc.), and there is an eventual release at the final end of life (e.g. via incineration). However, in the field of life cycle assessment (LCA) and carbon footprint analysis, which focuses on the evaluation of product systems, a static view is still the dominant approach. Few studies have considered dynamic effects, and if so, only by taking into account time differentiation for the foreground system [1]. Therefore, it is only recently that a fully dynamic LCA has been applied (in this case, dynamic only implies temporal differentiation), in particular through the dynamic process-based LCA (DyPLCA) framework, tool and related temporal database [2]. Yet, there are several aspects needing improvement, four of which were selected for the focus of this study: ranging from providing an updated respective background temporal database and impact assessment methods to improving the modeling of carbon fluxes for circular biobased systems, in this case forestry and wood products cascading. A framework has been developed to tackle these gaps, as specified in the next section. An application to two cases of the CALIMERO project is envisioned: (1) one on laminated strand lumber (LSL) & (2) the Swedish pulp and paper sector.