Okala Impact Factors

North American single-figure process values for impact assessment

Philip White
Assistant Professor, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University Chair, Ecodesign Section, Industrial Designers Society of America 2007 InLCA Conference, Portland Oregon USA October 2007

Okala Impact Factors

North American single-figure process values for impact assessment

Motivations Structure of Okala assessment methodology Process input/output inventory data Heuristic applications Needs of system developers

Motivations

Motivations for Okala Impact Factors

The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) supports the Design Professions to become more ecologically responsible. We worked within the IDSA/EPA Partnership, administered through the EPA Design for Environment Office, to develop applied LCA methods for the Design profession. Okala means life-giving energy in indigenous Hopi language; it honors indigenous wisdom about the integral relationship between humans and the natural world.

Motivations for Okala Impact Factors

The environmental performance of products and systems is determined early in the design process. Therefore, Product Development Teams and designers need comprehensive Lifecycle Assessment methods that are fast and easy to use. The methods should minimize data uncertainties while offering a wide range of materials and processes required by the product development processes of various industries. North American enterprises prefer a North American LCA methodology. The LCA method would be used inside companies, not for public assertions. The method should be applicable in educating designers, engineers and business managers about applied LCA.

Structure of Okala assessment methodology

Structure of Okala assessment methodology

Single figure score values are faster and easier to use than multiattribute scores, especially for complex systems that include many materials and processes. Process LCA inventory data is increasingly available for a diverse range of materials and processes that design teams use. Recently developed North American characterization methods, normalization data and weighting values are available.

Structure of Okala assessment methodology

The Okala impact factors use the following LCA components:

Characterization: Normalization: Weighting:

TRACI 1 US EPA 2 NIST 3

1. Bare, Jane, et al, The Tool of reduction and Assessment of Chemical and other Environmental Impacts (TRACI), Journal of Industrial Ecology, Volume 6, number 3-4, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002 2. Bare, Jane, Gloria, Tom, and Norris, Greg, Development of the Method and U.S. Normalization Database for Life Cycle Assessment and Sustainability Metrics, Environmental Science and
Technology, Vol. 40, NO. 16, 2006

3. Lippiatt, Bobbie, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Presentation of BEES draft weighting values, InLCA Conference, Washington DC, 2006

Okala impact categories

Okala employs the 2006 version of TRACI, which no longer includes habitat alteration. It splits human cancer and human noncancer health effects which were previously combined in one category. Okala refers to this last category as human toxicity, and refers to the TRACI criteria air pollutants category as human respiratory. Okala excludes indoor air pollution because it involves double-counting. Okala excludes water use because there is not an effective global characterization method for this regionally defined impact category.

Why use normalization for Okala?

We use normalization values (developed by the US EPA) because this harmonizes the divergent units of each of the impact categories. Once the impacts from the different categories are in similar units (unit-free) they are summed to deliver a single figure score.

Why use weighting for Okala?

By using weights of equal value (not weighting) we do not avoid the subjectivity that is associated with weighting. Deciding to use equal weighting of each impact category is as subjective a decision as assigning unequal weighting values. Okala weighting values were developed by NIST. NIST is a recognized US authority on science and technology; the NIST normalization values are the most legitimate values for the TRACI method that are currently available.

Okala process input/output inventory data

Okala inventory data selection criteria

Criteria for selecting process input/output inventory data: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. North American electricity data (amended to include CO2 emissions) Most detailed and thoroughly documented data (usually Ecoinvent data) One data source for families of materials or processes will be compared to each other (example: landfill and incineration data, Ecoinvent) If data sets had equal levels of detail, North American data preferred Sole source data for material or process data requested by designers, even if with a low level of detailed documentation. Timeframe is large, 1980 2005 ISystem boundaries exclude 4th and higher order impacts: production of manufacturing equipment, construction of factories or transportation infrastructures

Okala inventory data sources

Ecoinvent Ecoinvent+ Delft U. BUWAL Franklin Franklin+ Orb Pre' APME US LCI
+ amended

8 9 24 15

8 14 8 2

155

Okala Impact Factor materials and processes

polymers polymer processing metals metal processing ceramics plant, animal products paper + print fuels other materials power transport incineration landfill

Okala impact factors were developed for 230 materials and processes. We also offer global warming potentials of each of these in CO2 equivalencies.

New materials and processes

2004 Survey of Practicing Designers 95 practicing product designers reported that the they needed factors for the following materials and processes. We located inventory data for these and include them in the 2007 Okala Impact Factors.
fiberboard carbon fiber glass-filled nylon Titanium local water Aluminum forging powder coating particleboard epoxy acrylic detergent imported water Aluminum casting Li-ion batteries

www.idsa.org/whatsnew/sections/ecosection

Okala impact factors were developed for 230 materials and processes.

Amended inventory data

Recycled thermoplastics Ecoinvent did not offer data for recycled thermoplastics. Franklin data, which was of a lower quality, did offer recycled thermoplastics data, The Okala inventory data for recycled plastics was made by taking the difference between the Franklin primary and secondary thermoplastic data and subtracting that from the respective Ecoinvent thermoplastic data.

Economically extrapolated impact factors

Gold and Silver The Okala Impact Factors for Gold were extrapolated and for silver were extrapolated from the Okala Impact Factors of Palladium and Platinum. March 2007 prices for all of these precious metals were used for this extrapolation. The factors are rounded to two significant figures.

Platinum

Gold

Palladium

Silver

US$ / lb.
impact factor millipoints / lb.

16000 260,000

8500 200,000

400 140,000

200 140,000

Economic allocation

Jeroen B. Guine, Reinout Heijungs and Gjalt Huppes, Economic Allocation: Examples and Derived Decision Tree, International Journal of LCA, (1) 23 33 (2004)

Some materials had multiple products, so we used economic allocation to proportion the share of lifecycle impact to the share of economic value of the various products.

Economic allocation
Sheep wool Inventory data (US LCI database) for the entire lifecycle of a sheep showed surprisingly high from methane production with subsequent global warming effects. Economic data indicated that over the lifecycle of a wool producing sheep, mutton comprises roughly 2/3 of the economic value and wool comprises 1/3. The Okala Impact Factor for wool was thus estimated to be 1/3 of the impacts of the entire sheep over its lifecycle.

By-product non-allocation
Bovine leather Inventory data (Delft U.) for production of bovine leather only included the emissions from processing the leather after butchering. The data implied that that beef would be produced regardless of the economic value of the leather, (that leather is a by-product), so economic allocation is unnecessary. The by-product opt-out rule for not using economic allocation is inconsistent. We need consistent allocation rules that apply equally to all products and systems.

Processes recommended to avoid

We took an editorial stance that the following materials should be avoided by system and product developers:

Nickel-Cadmium batteries Water from underground aquifers that are dropping Natural rubber from non-sustainable certified sources Tropical wood from non-sustainable certified sources

Unexpected results: municipal landfill

The following materials had considerably larger impacts in municipal landfills than in production. These large (X8) impacts are from ecotoxicity, human toxicity and human cancer.

Okala Impact millipoints/lb

material
Aluminum, primary Cardboard, primary, unbleached Paper, primary, bleached

Production 130 10 11

Landfill 1000 85 36

Unexpected results: municipal incineration

The following materials had considerably larger impacts in municipal incinerators than in production. These large impacts are also from ecotoxicity, human toxicity and human cancer. Impacts from dioxin production in the incineration process were surprisingly small.
Okala Impact millipoints/lb

material
Aluminum, primary Copper, primary Lead, primary steel, primary LDPE, HDPE, GPS, PP EPS

Production 130 320 5200 25 10 ~13 17

Incineration 860 5600 150000 210 20 23

Heuristic applications

Okala
Modules are organized in four sections.

Okala curricula:
Course guide
64 page full-color guide for students

19 module presentations
In PowerPoint

Instructors guide
Practical advice for each module

Used in more than 50 colleges of design in North America

LCA for industrial designers

Teaching objectives: 1. Quickly teach students to understand how to model ecological performance, and understand how key variables directly affect ecological performance 2. Sequentially work on more complex projects to understand more complex applications and comparisons

LCA for design students

1st assignment: Bill of materials provided

We supply the bill of materials for a product with packaging, including power usage and functional unit. Students estimate product lifetime (total hrs. of system use) and complete the assessment in Okala impact millipoints/ hour of use.

LCA for design students

140

1st assignment:
120 Okala impact millipoints / hour of use

By redesigning the system for lower impacts/hour of use, students learn how key variables affect the systems ecological performance: Material type and quantity Energy type and quantity Transport type, distance & system weight, End of life treatment Product longevity

100

80

material impacts energy impacts

60

40

20

stereo system

new design

LCA for design students

2nd assignment:
Redesign existing system Students disassemble a product such as a hand-tool, and create a bill of materials from scratch for the reference assessment. As with the previous assignment, they redesign the system to explore ways to improve its ecological performance. They explore the most appropriate functional unit for this assessment.

LCA for design students

3rd assignment:
Compare to combined systems By researching trends in behavior and technology, students design new systems that do not have obvious precedents. To enable a comparative assessment, students construct a competitor product to assess, often by combining dissimilar systems.
Assessment of this monitor concept required the comparison to a combined handheld PDA and a bedside monitor.

Needs of system developers

Developer information needs

www.idsa.org/whatsnew/sections/ecosection

There are yet many processes requested by the 2004 designers survey for which we seek process inventory data to make Okala Impact Factors:
Indian electricity PLA-plastic bio-diesel corn ethanol marble granite cattle silicone rubber bamboo Chinese electricity recycled nylon fabric cellulosic ethanol Ni-metal hydride bat. electronic components open-air incineration low-quality land-fills electronic components

Okala Impact Factor materials and processes

polymers polymer processing metals metal processing ceramics plant, animal products paper + print fuels other materials power transport incineration landfill

Okala impact factors for 230 materials and processes

Lack of data on incineration

We lack incineration data for the 75% of burnable materials that we have production data for.

polymers
Materials for which we polymer processing

metals ceramics

have incineration data

metal processing plant, animal products paper + print fuels other materials power transport incineration landfill

Materials that can be incinerated

Lack of data on land-filling

Materials for which we have land-fill data

polymers polymer processing metals metal processing ceramics plant, animal products paper + print fuels other materials power transport incineration landfill

We lack land-fill data for the 85% of materials that we have production data for.

Materials that can be landfilled.

2008 Funding Priorities

$6.4 billion
National Science Foundation

2008 Funding Priorities

$6.4 billion
National Science Foundation

$7.2 billion
Environmental Protection Agency

2008 Funding Priorities

$6.4 billion
National Science Foundation

$7.2 billion
Environmental Protection Agency

0
Process Inventory Data Research

Okala Impact Factors

North American single-figure process values for impact assessment

Improve Okala assessment methodology Expand the range of materials and processes Refine methods to teach LCA to system developers

Okala design guide

www.idsa.org/whatsnew/sections/ecosection

Special thanks to: Jane Bare of the US EPA and Michiel Oele of Pre Consultancy, NL

Philip White
Assistant Professor College of Design and School of Sustainability Arizona State University

p.white@asu.edu