The carbon footprint of assets will increasingly be of importance to obtain beneficial, economic, social and environmental outcomes of design and engineering projects. Inclusion of a Next Life strategy at asset or product end-of-life can significantly reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of First Life assets and Next Life reuses compared to the same uses made from virgin material or recycled content. Traditional engineering design and asset management often only plan for initial use and the management or maintenance strategies necessary to extend First Life, where the First Life is the primary engineering role of the asset. Critically missing from this picture are the costs and environmental impacts incurred throughout the asset or product lifecycle, especially associated with the end-of-life of an asset. A Next Life optimization process for these decisions is described herein that can aid in maximizing the overall Materials Sustainability and Materials Utility (i.e., longevity of fruitful usage) embedded in assets. It consists of appraisal, brainstorming, partnering and evaluation of beneficial impact for particular Next Life options allowing the benefits they can provide to First Life and Next Life opportunities. These benefits can include a reduction in carbon footprint over a lifecycle, cost savings related to GHG emissions, cost savings related to reused material/labor for Next Life assets, or other beneficial impact (even if increased financial cost). The process includes a qualitative conceptual assessment that can feed into a more detailed quantitative assessment for optimization of Next Life materials usage.
Traditional engineering design and asset management often only plan for initial use and the management or maintenance strategies necessary to extend First Life, where the First Life is the primary engineering role of the asset. Critically missing from this picture are the costs and environmental impacts incurred throughout the asset or product (hereafter ‘asset’) lifecycle, especially associated with the end-of-life of an asset. It follows that decommissioning and disposal considerations have not been addressed in the design of most assets. By way of demonstration, in 2019 it was estimated that only 9% of materials were involved in circular reuse globally.1 As a result, it was estimated in the same year that 50-62% of the world greenhouse gases (GHGs) arose from material extraction, processing and manufacturing.1,2 Consequently, the embodied energy, carbon and water (constituting the history of production of the materials composing the asset), and the intrinsic value of the materials themselves in this typical scenario will be either harvested in a highly inefficient manner, or essentially lost (when destined for landfill) at end-of-life. The opportunity associated with this wasted value can be reclaimed through minimal added expense and labor at the planning stage(s) of an asset, resulting in a maximum impact on the materials/energy consumption and increasing the Materials Sustainability of the project. Increased Materials Sustainability can be achieved through reduced environmental impact (e.g., carbon footprint). Standards such as ISO(1) 140673 providing guidance for assessing the carbon footprint of products can be leveraged to quantify the costs and benefits that can be realized through an asset's lifecycle associated with emissions and emissions avoidance. Examples of planning-stage decisions with large sustainability impact include avoidance of ‘monstrous hybrids’ (e.g., composite materials that are difficult, if not impossible, to be deconstructed into recyclable constituents), inclusion of purposeful strategies to reduce de-manufacturing costs, and inclusion of Next Life usage(s) and partners in manufacturing plans. Proactive decisions to reduce the carbon footprint of assets taken during planning, operation and decommissioning serve to reduce the environmental impacts of the asset directly (Scope 1), indirectly from energy usage (Scope 2) and/or from the upstream and downstream value chain (Scope 3).4,5 Although ISO 140673 briefly mentions possible end-of-life scenarios for an asset to be accounted for in the carbon footprint, this work documents a creative approach for optimizing the end-of-life pathway of an asset through identification of one or more Next Life usages. Redirection of the asset at decommissioning through a Next Life usage is a promising approach to increase the Materials Sustainability in many cases, but will increase the Materials Utility (i.e., longevity of fruitful usage) in every case. The approach iteratively considers appraisal of the materials, brainstorming, partnering and evaluation of the beneficial impact to achieve improvement in the Materials Sustainability of an asset using the metric of carbon footprint.
