Including Ecosystems in Process Design and Life Cycle Assessment for Environmental Sustainability and Innovation

Even though all human activities require goods and services from nature for their sustenance, conventional engineering has kept ecosystems outside its decision boundary. Ignoring or undervaluing these critical ecosystem goods and services (ES) has resulted in their over use and degradation, and can also mean lost opportunities for innovation and environmental sustainability. Recent efforts are accounting for the role of ecosystems in supporting human activities and are demonstrating the many economic, environmental and societal benefits of including nature in human decisions. Such advances related to engineering design and life cycle assessment have been demonstrated through case studies, but rigorous methods are needed for systematic inclusion of ecosystems in engineering decisions. This work will advance the framework of Techno-Ecological Synergy (TES), with specific focus on developing methods for, 1) integrated design of chemical processes and ecosystems on and around manufacturing sites while accounting for their temporal and spatial variation, 2) including ecosystem services in life cycle assessment (LCA) by means of a rigorous mathematical framework, 3) education and outreach activities to improve knowledge about ecosystem services among students and practitioners. Local TES design at a manufacturing site will be formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem that accounts for spatial and temporal variation of these systems such as the intermittent availability of many ecosystem services versus the continuous demand for these services from human activities. The mathematical framework for ES in LCA will explicitly include ecosystems in LCA along with their synergies and trade-offs in providing ES, and their interaction with technological systems. It will enable calculation of sustainability metrics by comparing the demand and supply of ES at multiple spatial scales. This work will be in collaboration with an expert in ecosystem services, and will be applied to problems of interest to industry sustainability. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.