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Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems

Liu, Xinyu
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1532010848792021

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Chemical Engineering.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) has enabled consideration of environmental impacts beyond the narrow boundary of traditional engineering methods. This reduces the chance of shifting impacts outside the system boundary. It has been among the widely used methods for guiding sustainable decision-making. However, sustainability also requires that supporting ecosystems are not adversely affected and remain capable of providing goods and services for supporting human activities. Conventional LCA does not account for this role of nature, and its metrics are best for comparing alternatives. These relative metrics do not provide information about absolute environmental sustainability, which requires comparison between the demand and supply of ecosystem services (ES). Techno-Ecological Synergy (TES) is a framework to account for ES, and has been demonstrated by application to systems such as buildings and manufacturing activities that have narrow system boundaries. This work develops a systematic methodology for TES-LCA by expanding the steps in conventional LCA to incorporate the demand and supply of ecosystem goods and services at multiple spatial scales. This enables calculation of absolute environmental sustainability metrics, and helps identify opportunities for improving a life cycle not just by reducing impacts, but also by restoring and protecting ecosystems. Case studies have been conducted to demonstrate the general applicability of the framework to any systems and in terms of both design and assessment tasks. TES of rice farming compares the sustainability performance of rice production activities in China, India and United States, with the focus on quantifying the impacts of human activities on ES provisioning. TES-LCA assessment of a biofuel life cycle considers ES of carbon sequestration, air quality regulation, and water provisioning. Results show that for the carbon sequestration ecosystem service, farming can be locally sustainable but unsustainable at the global or serviceshed scale. Air quality regulation is unsustainable at all scales, while water provisioning is sustainable at all scales for a study in the eastern part of the United States. TES-LCA design of a residential system suggests that accounting for the synergy between technological and ecological system can result in innovative designs. Win-win scenarios can be discovered, which would not be available for conventional techno-focus designs. This work also develops a computational framework of TES-LCA by extending the framework of conventional process LCA. It explicitly includes ecosystems as modules along with process modules in conventional LCA. The basic computational structure is then adapted to account for regional and serviceshed information. Mathematical proofs have been provided to show the generality of the proposed TES-LCA computational structure, as compared to existing LCA frameworks. Moreover, this work proposes a knowledge extraction methodology by coupling multi-objective optimization outcomes with machine learning algorithms, aiming to extract heuristics to guide the future design of similar systems. The methodology is applied to the residential system design case study to obtain insights on optimality.
Bhavik R. Bakshi (Advisor)
James F. Rathman (Committee Member)
David L. Tomasko (Committee Member)
Jay F. Martin (Committee Member)
216 p.
Chemical Engineering

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Liu, X. (2018). Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1532010848792021

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Liu, Xinyu. Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems. 2018. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1532010848792021.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Liu, Xinyu. "Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1532010848792021

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1532010848792021
278
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.