A necessary step forward for proper non-energetic abiotic resource use consideration in life cycle assessment: The functional dissipation approach using dynamic material flow analysis data

Abstract

The impact of non-energetic abiotic resource use in life cycle as- sessment (LCA) has been receiving much attention in the last decades, and even more so since the resource efficiency and circular economy have become prominent subjects of discussion in public and private sectors all around the world. As LCA has proven to be the most solid holistic tool to integrate environmental impacts in sustainability as- sessments of product systems, it should be able to integrate current concerns about non-energetic abiotic resource use into its methodology and therefore provide exploitable results for every LCA user. However, to this day no consensus has been reached on which approach for characterizing impacts due to the use of these resources should be used (Drielsma et al., 2016; Sonderegger et al., 2017). This seems to be at- tributable to the fact that no method is recognized as both solid on the methodological level while answering at the same time the true con- cerns for abiotic natural resource uses in LCA: the need to retain and therefore maximize their functional value in the technosphere after their extraction in order to fulfill the needs of current and future gen- erations, while minimizing the losses to the ecosphere. Indeed, abiotic resources are not always consumed