Our division performs research within quantitative sustainability assessment in a life cycle perspective. Out of the three dimensions of sustainability (environment, society and economy), our work only address two of them, namely the assessment of environmental and social impacts.
Our focus is on development of generic methods and decision support tools to assess sustainability in a quantitative way. We also work with the tailoring of the generic tools to meet the specificities of different application domains. The aim is to support measurement and reporting of sustainability performance in an objective and systematic manner, helping decision makers and companies to avoid the trap of just claiming sustainability.
Our focus is academic, but also on the more applied side developing tools for decision makers, managers and developers of products, product systems and services
Our main areas of research are:
- Life cycle impact assessment: improvements in the assessment of toxicity related impacts (e.g. simplified characterisation models, indoor exposure, assessment of nano and biomaterials, terrestrial and marine ecotoxicity), spatial differentiation, uncertainty management, damage modeling, new impact categories
- Social life cycle assessment: framework, selection of impact categories,
development of impact assessment methodologies, feasibility and data availability
Life Cycle Management, adaptation and testing of LCA tools for specific technology domains, industries and contexts in decision support.