Publishable summary: The objectives of this study are to assess the environmental and economic performances of the Lighthouse demonstrators considering both, the initial reference or business as usual and the scenario where symbiosis actions have been performed. These performances have been evaluated based on an integrated assessment via Life Cycle based approach provided by T3.3. through the LCA and LCC methodologies. Data has been obtained from the facilitators partners involved in each lighthouse, and from previous results obtained within the project.
Three lighthouses have been studied, which will be explained in more detail in each section.
One of the objectives of the study is the Life cycle assessment (LCA), with the aim of evaluating environmental performance of the Lighthouse demonstrators independently and after the symbiosis. The study has been carried out in two steps, where the second step pays special attention to processes, sub-systems and impact categories that were identified as material in the first step. The two steps are: 1) initial screening assessments based on preliminary LCI, 2) full assessments based on higher quality data and relevance. The inventory analysis from a life cycle perspective (LCI) has been developed for the different evaluation study cases (i.e., baseline and future scenario after implementation). The comprehensive LCI has been developed by mainly using the information gathered from and openly shared among partners and results of previous WPs as well as reliable and available literature sources, industry-average life-cycle data from life-cycle-inventory databases, industry association reports, government statistics or similar. Finally, the development of the impact assessment, has been executed in order to provide specific conclusions and recommendations based on the attained results, taking LCI data quality into account and using a prospective life cycle approach.
The other objective is assessing all life cycle costs generated for the initial starting baseline/s scenarios and for the symbiotic situation after the implementation of lighthouse demonstrator technologies.
In this line, a purely economic evaluation has been carried out, considering the following four main cost categories: investment, operation, maintenance and end-of-life disposal expenses. Similarly, to the LCA study, an LCI identifying and quantifying all the costs incurred during the life cycle stages has been developed. Based on the gathered information from partners and results of previous WPs and literature review, in-house databases and the performed LCA, the LCC has enabled comparative cost assessments over a specified period of time, considering all relevant economic factors and criteria, both in terms of initial capital costs and future operational and replacement costs. In this manner, useful information for identifying best practices that allow minimization of economic impacts is expected to be generated to facilitate the decision-making process.
Additionally, within the Sub-task 9.2.3. led by CIRCE, a preliminary screening tool has been developed with the aim of helping decision-making in the early stages of an IS initiative. Each IS initiative is different and requires many different considerations. On the contrary companies have the need to quickly estimate the potential impacts without developing detailed methodologies as LCA and LCC. This study helps on identifying for each of the demos those key indicators that are relevant for each one and can help to go ahead with an IS initiative or to rejects it (go/no go). A set of indicators have been defined based on previous experiences and input from the demos. Among these indicators, a social one like job creation, an economic one like raw material savings and an environmental one like GHG emissions savings have been done. The main aim of this tool is to get some insights from each of the demos and develop an easy tool that help companies to estimate the preliminary impacts with new IS initiatives and to decide whether or not to go ahead.