Environmental analysis should be performed early in the Research and Development (R&D) phases of new technologies to timely determine potential impact and, thereby, include prevention and minimization of unfavorable ecological impact into the innovation process. Here, we demonstrate the application of anticipatory Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) on novel anti-reflective coatings used for greenhouses in the Netherlands. Currently, these coating technologies are developed at the laboratory scale (lab-scale), but they have the potential to be transferred to commercial scale on the short term. What-if scenarios have been used to scale-up the coating production process to pilot and industrial scales. The scenarios were developed by optimizing the laboratory scale coating production parameters. A cradle-to-grave LCA has been done to compare novel coatings with conventional coatings. The functional unit has been defined as the production of 1692.30 kg of tomatoes in greenhouses during 30 years. Results indicate that the novel coating manufactured at industrial scale can compete with conventional coatings in terms of the environmental performance. Furthermore, LCA shows that the novel coating assessed does not bring environmental benefits as compared to employing uncoated glass. However, the use of the glass coating in the greenhouse may bring economic benefits during functional lifetime by means of increased yield of crop (e.g. tomatoes). Different pathways of the technological development of the novel coating have been considered in the sensitivity analysis. The option that includes glass manufacturing in the Netherlands rather than China has led to the best environmental impact results.

Most applications of LCA deal with environmental compliance, strategic development and environmental product declarations. While useful, these evaluations are reserved for technologies and products that have already reached a level of maturity and commercialization that does not allow much improvement on their environmental performance. Being retrospective and reactive, these assessments miss out on the opportunity of making any recommendation or improvement before the environmental impact of a technology is locked-in.For the purposes of guiding technology development from early design stages, the existing LCA framework needs to be adapted in order to cope with the hurdles proper of the evaluation of technologies that are still under development. Recent efforts include techniques to deal with scarce and uncertain data, scaling pilot/lab scale to full-fledged performances as well as background and landscape future changes.This study draws on knowledge available on scaling relations, uncertainty analysis and multi criteria decision analysis as resources for the application of LCA in the development of emerging technologies for distributed rural electrification. As a case study, three different direct carbon fuel cell (DCFC) designs were compared to a photovoltaic microgrid and evaluated for their environmental performance. So far only developed in laboratory scale, inventory data for DCFC was scaled up based on the desired power capacity and estimated future performance for the electrification of a hypothetical health clinic in rural Uganda. Results reveal that within the boundaries of this study and considering the ideal performance expected for future deployment, DCFC with a solid oxide conducting electrolyte can be a competitive alternative to a PV microgrid, when considering life cycle environmental performance. Conducting an early LCA helped identify DCFC designs with the most environmental promise and revealed environmental hotspots of DCFC for attention towards further development.