10/04/2024
By Danielle Fretwell

The Francis College of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, invites you to attend a Doctoral Dissertation Proposal defense by Alana Smith on “Advancing Life Cycle Assessment Methodologies for Sustainable Systems.”

Candidate Name: Alana Smith
Degree: Doctoral
Defense Date: Friday, Oct. 11, 2024
Time: 10 a.m.-noon
Location: Lydon 203

Committee:
Advisor: Jasmina Burek, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, UML

Committee Members

  • Joy Winbourne, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, UML
  • Christopher Hansen, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, UML
  • Alessandro Sabato, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, UML

Brief Abstract:
The global climate emergency is compelling communities and organizations to seek sustainable solutions. Circularity concepts and nature-based solutions are being employed for their ability to reduce consumption of primary resources and address multiple issues simultaneously. Quantification of these benefits are crucial for effectively communicating the advantages of these systems to key stakeholders. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a standardized method to evaluate the environmental impacts of products, systems, services, organizations, and individuals. Circularity is a concept defined as replacing the traditional end-of-life phase with reducing, reusing, recycling, or recovering materials from the production and consumption phases to enhance environmental quality, social equity, and economic prosperity. LCA can be used to evaluate circularity options within systems from a holistic standpoint and help decision makers identify environmentally sustainable options and opportunities for improvements at each stage of the life cycle. Despite LCA’s many applications, it is lacking the inclusion of many Ecosystem Services - benefits natural systems provide to people and the environment - resulting in undervaluation of these benefits in environmental assessments. Also, LCA is often used to calculate footprints, which are negative impacts we have on the environment, but recently there has been an interest in quantifying positive contributions of organizations. This methodology is called handprinting. 

In the proposed work, I used traditional LCA to evaluate waste strategies of hemp waste from CBD production towards creating circularity within the industry. Next, I will contribute to methodological advancement in LCA by creating new characterization factors in a modified ecosystems services life cycle assessment (ES-LCA) framework that accounts for local and global climate regulation ecosystem services. I will utilize data collected from our sensor network at our food forest and lawn site on campus as a case study to test and validate this framework. Lastly, I will create a framework for quantifying positive sustainability efforts on campus to increase sustainability initiatives and track the benefit of such contributions using handprint methodology, where the environmental impacts of transforming the business-as-usual greenspace, lawn, into a food forest will be accounted for as a handprint effort for the university. Overall, this proposal is meant to apply and advance LCA methodologies for sustainable systems.