Why Life Cycle Assessment Does Not Work for Synthetic Biology
Why Life Cycle Assessment Does Not Work for Synthetic Biology
复制标题
为什么生命周期评估不适用于合成生物学
DOI：
10.1021/acs.est.7b01604
复制
发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
11.4
通讯作者：
Linkov, Igor
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Seager, Thomas P.;Trump, Benjamin D.;Poinsatte-Jones, Kelsey;Linkov, Igor
One of the triumphs of environmental sustainability has been the rapid adoption and application of life cycle assessment (LCA) to the analysis and management of risks related to chemical pollution. 1 Specifically, LCA provides a systematic accounting of resource use and environmental risks related to industrial ecology, that is, the material and energy exchanges between the economy and environment during raw materials extraction, manufacture, use, and disposal of products (Figure 1, left side). 2 Underlying LCA is the unstated supposition that industrial systems can be contained within an imaginary control volume that allows an unambiguous accounting of chemical exchanges across an industry-environment boundary. Nonetheless, production systems that are more complex than traditional manufacturing have tested the limits of the method.The first challenge to LCA emerged when analysts began to study agricultural production, where the boundaries between industry and the environment are blurred. Although factorybased production is centralized and standardized, agricultural systems are decentralized, heterogeneous, and explicitly open to the environment. Thus, agricultural-LCA must confront issues related to geospatial and intertemporal variability of system boundaries and environmental releases, ambiguity in definitions of resource use (eg, water consumption), and extraordinary sensitivity to selection of a functional unit (eg, dry mass, caloric, protein, or other nutritional content for food products).
