DECISION SUPPORT FOR BIOTECHNOLOGICAL PRODUCED PEPTIDES IN A DESIGN STAGE BY SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT
Special Symposium - Environmental Protection & Sustainability
Environmental Protection & Sustainability - III
Keywords: LCA, LCC, Biotechnology, Peptide, Society
Motivation
Environmental friendliness of products is becoming more and more important in the societal discussion. In the same way the costs of products are a matter of big interest both for producers and for the consumers. An increasing importance is attributed to social effects of products. These three topics, regarded over the entire life cycle of a product, establish the basis of products` “sustainability” .
For all three columns of sustainability the most crucial decisions are made in an early design stage of a product (see Figure 1). The most relevant changes can be determined for an ecologic, economic and social optimised production. This leads to the idea of an early-stage decision support regarding the columns of sustainability.
The purpose of the sustainability analysis is to support the decision making by providing “integrated decision support” in the R&D-stage of a product. It combines assessments covering environmental, economic, technical and social aspects. Therefore, a development study with pre-analysis and consequential simulations enables the pre-estimation of the sustainability of the technical processes. In the EU-funded project –“Bio-based Functional Materials from Engineered Self-Assembling Peptides (BASE)”, an integrated consideration of all life cycle aspects of chosen peptides is made.
BASE - Bio-based Functional Materials from Engineered Self-Assembling Peptides
The BASE-project aims at advancing the science and technology of sustainable and functional materials. Specifically it targets innovative nano-coatings for plastics, metals and ceramic objects, exploiting the self-assembly capabilities of short (<25) amino-acid sequences (=peptides) in industrially relevant applications.
Self-assembly is a method of spontaneous organisation of molecules into higher order structures and defined by set boundary conditions (e.g. pH, temperature hydrogen-bonding strength, ionic strength, polarity of the solvent and nature of substrate).
The innovativeness resides with the shortness of the peptides and associated structure forming capacity to create tailored bio-inspired functionality. Short peptides offer a more manageable science and open a window towards a cost effective availability through biotechnological routes.
Within this project sustainability analysis is carried out during the development phase using the method of LCA, LCC and LCWE, which are described below.
Methods
Environment - Life Cycle Analysis: Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is a method to determine the environmental impacts of a product or system during its whole life cycle including the production and supply of all precursor substances, operating supplies, auxiliary materials, energies etc.. It is an addition of traditional research and development assessment, in which only cost and the function of the new technology are in the focus. All relevant impact categories are assessed, taking into consideration the goal of the study and emissions released from the product system under examination.
Economy – Life Cycle Costing: Life Cycle Costing (LCC) is a technique to establish the total cost of ownership or the total production cost of a product or service system.
A particular aspect in this analysis is that, unlike the situation in LCA, where insight into all the processes of the value chain is needed for an assessment of the environmental impacts, the economy offers the ‘rucksack-principle’ of prices, i.e. prices of products have the comfortable nature of summing up the whole value chain of the production. With a product bought for a certain price, one does not have to bother about the origin of this price, whether it is derived from the costs of a certain production step or from the profit of the producer, or even if the producer is making any profit at all, the costs within the boundaries of the other players can be viewed as a black box, without requiring any differentiation [1].
Society – Life Cycle Working Environment: Life Cycle Working Environment (LCWE) methodology [2] measures the work-related social effects of processes and products. It is based on the same product life cycle model as the LCA, ensuring consistency with the LCA- and LCC-part of the study. Similar to LCA, an insight into all processes of the system is required in order to assess the impacts.
A summary of the three above described methods can be seen at Figure 2.
In this study, the concept of sustainability analysis is applied at the production of biotechnological produced peptides for several applications. The principle competing conventional applications serve as benchmarks.
Discussion
The method of the early stage sustainability analysis for the mentioned biotechnological produced peptides will be discussed in this paper considering an example of one of the regarded possible applications in the project.
References:
[1] Rebitzer, G., Hunkeler, D.: Life Cycle Costing in LCM: Ambitions, Opportunities and Limitations, Int. J. LCA, 8 (5), 2003.
[2] Barthel, L. et al: Methodology of Life Cycle Sustainability for Sustainability Assessments, Sustainable Development Research Conference (SDRC), 2005, Helsinki, Finland
[3] IKP-LBP Universität Stuttgart, PE Europe GmbH (Hrsg.): GaBi 4, Software und Datenbank zur Ganzheitliche Bilanzierung, Stuttgart, 1992-2002.
See the full pdf manuscript of the abstract.
Presented Monday 17, 16:00 to 16:20, in session Environmental Protection & Sustainability - III (S-7C).
