Graphene transparent electrode (GTE) has been attracting much attention due to fascinating physical properties. However, the extensive deployment of copper foil within GTE production has imparted substantial environmental burden. This paper is a cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) study to investigate the environmental impacts of roll-to-roll produced chemical vapor deposition (CVD) GTE and the environmental potential of recycling copper foil for cleaner production. Four production scenarios are developed to promote the lab-to-fab progress, including lab scenario, industry baseline scenario, industry recycling scenario and microwave plasma chemical CVD scenario. The functional unit is set as 1 m2 of the GTE production and the life cycle inventories of different scenarios are explored. Results show that the copper foil is a major contributor in baseline scenario in the category of primary energy consumption and global warming. The impacts of GTE production in industry recycling scenario vary from 0.01 to 0.18 of the values in industry baseline scenario. Therefore, copper foil recycling shows environmental potential for GTE production. If all building integrated photovoltaics transition to employing perovskite solar cells with GTE produced in copper recycling scenario, the potential reduction in CO2 emissions is estimated at 141.2 million kilograms per year. The findings serve as a roadmap for the industry, highlighting key areas where improvements can be made to upscale production while minimizing environmental impact. This paper provides insights into the major environmental contributors in the GTE production, guiding the upscaling routes for cleaner GTE production in the future.

The European building stock demands urgent renovation due to the age of the buildings, their expected lifetime, and their excessive energy consumption, which accounts for more than a third of the EU’s total emissions. However, the complexities involved, such as time, costs, and structural modifications, often discourage clients, tenants, and occupants from undergoing a building renovation process. Textile membranes, despite their long history in various architectural applications, have only been employed in façades in the last decades. Their intrinsic properties, such as lightness and flexibility, together with rapid assembly and low maintenance make these materials particularly suitable for façade retrofitting. Therefore, they are worth exploring as a way to promote the development of lightweight and easy-to-assemble façade products that could help overcome the current limitations of building retrofitting efforts. This paper aims to establish relationships between textile membranes and potential building retrofit applications. To this end, this study builds on the categorization of traditional façade retrofit strategies and proposes a new classification for textile façade retrofit products. The methodology includes a comprehensive literature review of textile properties and characteristics, along with a thorough assessment through case studies, of membrane use in façade applications. A sequential investigation leads to the main outcome of identifying three clear pathways for the development of new textile-based façade products for building retrofit.