Life Cycle Assessment of Polysaccharide Materials: A Review
By Li Shen, Martin K. Patel. 2008
168 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Apart from conventional uses of polysaccharide materials, such as food, clothing, paper packaging and construction, new polysaccharide products and materials have been developed. This paper reviews life cycle assessment (LCA) studies in order to gain insight of the environmental profiles of polysaccharide products (e.g. viscose or natural fibre polymer composites) in comparison with their conventional counterparts (e.g. cotton or petrochemical polymers). The application areas covered are textiles, engineering materials and packing. It is found that for each stage of the life cycle (production, use phase and waste management) polysaccharide-based end products show better environmental profiles than their conventional counterparts in terms of non-renewable energy use (NREU) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Cotton is an exception, with high environmental impacts that are related to the use of fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and high water consumption. The available literature for man-made cellulose fibres shows that they allow to reduce NREU and GHG emissions in the fibre production phase. No study has been found for the fabric production and the use phase of man-made cellulose textiles.
Subfields: Biomaterials, Building and Construction, Polymers and Plastics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a0eca9c4670ab411c96d077f7397628191907d6
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In Biomaterials
In Building and Construction
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Citations in the corpus
- Biodegradation and hydrolysis rate of aliphatic aromatic polyester. (2010, methodology): “…b s t r a c t The biodegradation and hydrolysis rates of an aliphatic aromatic copolyester were measured in manure, food, and yard compost environments and in phosphate buffer solution (pH ¼ 8.0) and vermiculite at 58 C. Mineralization, molecular weight reduction, and structural…”
- Sustainability assessments of bio-based polymers (2013, background): “While there have been studies clearly stating that biopolymers will not break down under landfill conditions, particularly PLA [41,53,59,63], others still report methane emissions from landfilling as an impact in the life cycle for these products [42,50,51,54,55], thus increasing the GWP associated ”
- Life-cycle and environmental impact assessments on processing of plant fibres and its bio-composites: A critical review (2020, methodology): “The LCA of polysaccharide-based materials has been measured by Shen and Patel [89].”