Touchstone for "green" and "low-carbon" —— the theory, practice and platform of MLCA in China

Zuoren Nie

Beijing University of Technology,
No. 100 Pingleyuan, Chaoyang District, Beijing

In the present world, countries with diverse economic structures are implementing various scientific and engineering strategies to achieve a high-quality sustainable development of human society. For China, materials industry, such as iron and steel, nonferrous meter, cement etc., is the cardinal sector dominating the CO₂ emission on the whole. It occurs over the entire value-chain of materials and its products, i.e., from the extraction of minerals to the EOL of materials. Therefore, materials life cycle assessment (MLCA) has emerged as a valuable quantitative method to objectively analyze the environmental performance of materials, which provides scientific evidences for judging whether the material could be labelled as ‘green’ or ‘low-carbon’. This presentation will introduce the motivation and state-of-art of MLCA research and practice in China, mainly including the following aspects: (1) development status of carbon emission reduction technologies in materials industry in China; (2) academic progress in developing materials science-specific models, e.g., exergy-based evaluation theory, process-based calculation model for LCI compilation, and application examples of the above; (3) established MLCA database (Sino-center), software and application platform of MLCA in China.