Anticipatory Life Cycle Assessment of Sol-Gel Derived Anti-Reflective Coating for Greenhouse Glass

Abstract

Innovation has become one of the global aspirations of this era being the main driver not only for economic growth but also for sustainable development and improvement of human wellbeing. Although novel technology can bring benefits and opportunities, it may cause unintended and undesirable consequences to environment and society. In order to prevent future ecological disadvantages, environmental analysis is carried out to estimate the impacts of a certain innovation. Environmental assessment of technologies is usually carried out when they have been already launched in the market. As a result, reoriention of the technological development towards better environmental performance in the later stages of Research and Development (R&D) becomes more complicated. Anticipatory Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been developed as a framework to assess the environmental impacts of new technologies by exploring possible paths of the technological development. The thesis project demonstrates the application of Anticipatory LCA for the analysis of the innovation at the early phase of R&D. The aim of the following work is to guide the Netherlands Organization of Applied Scientific Research (TNO) coating innovation technology based on LCA impact results. The novel coating is being synthesized at laboratory scale and has a great potential to be launched in the market. The scenarios method was used to scale up the coating production process to pilot and industrial scales. The LCA results showed that the novel coating manufactured at industrial scale would have approximately the same environmental impacts as conventional coatings in the future. In this study, environmental impact of implementation of the new coating was studied with the help of Sensitivity analysis. Depending on feedstock and logistics, reductions could be achieved with respect to environmental impact while implementing the same innovation.