Environmental assessment methods for systems of products

I develop my research work in the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability (IES) of the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Union. The JRC gives scientific and technical support for the development of European policies. This thesis allows the collaboration among the work of G-SCOP team and the one of IES-JRC.
My scientific work in the JRC focuses on four environmental product policies: Ecodesign and Energy Labelling Directives, the EU Green Public Procurement (GPP) and the EU Ecolabel. These product policies establish environmental requirements for the manufacturers of consumer products especially those that consume energy during their use phase (i.e. Energy related Products). While Ecodesign and Energy Labelling Directives are compulsory, GPP and EU Ecolabel are voluntary, but all four aim at boosting the EU markets towards greater environmental sustainability.

Specifically, for my thesis work, I am exploring how products, which are linked in systems, behave from a holistic environmental point of view. For example, regarding taps and boilers, the energy “related consumption” of the taps relies on the boiler’s efficiency. There will be a total energy efficiency and consumption and thus, a whole environmental impact associated to the system taps-boiler.


PhD student: Maria CALERO PASTOR
Université Grenoble-Alpes, 2013
Directors of the thesis: Daniel BRISSAUD, Fabrice MATHIEUX

Partnership: European Commission – Joint Research Center – Institute for the Environment and Sustainability
                    

SoA on environmental assessment on systems and case study preliminary assessment.

Development of the approach on the environmental assessment methods for systems of products.

Validation of the approach through the case study.

Proposal of an approach on how to aggregate product level environmental assessment results to obtain system level assessments:

• The whole life cycle will be considered and will be multi criteria: consumption of resources, environmental impacts (including water scarcity), resource efficiency, etc.

• For calculating the environmental performance of products and systems, it could be potentially used Life Cycle Assessment, Product Environmental Footprint, Resource efficiency of products methodology, etc.

Implementation of the outputs of the thesis for design improvement.

Last Update 2015.02.23