Life Cycle Impact Assessment of Inorganic Metal Compounds

Metal emissions are present in various core sectors such as various industrial and agricultural activities and dominate the toxicity impacts both in the environment and human health. Environmentally relevant metals (and metalloids) of concern depending on their abundance and potential toxicity in organisms include Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, Cd, Pb, Hg, and As. Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods regarding chemical toxicity usually focus on nonpolar organic substances which induce bias and uncertainty to metal toxicity as they have unique chemical properties, such as speciation. Those special properties show the high influence of ambient chemistry and the emission form on the metal toxicity.

Although the current characterization models include speciation for several metals, they neglect to incorporate core physic-chemical properties that can influence ecotoxicity, such dissolution and precipitation, as indicated in. Additionally, the emission inventories lack to include detailed information for metal emissions such as the emitted species and particle sizes, which is highly relevant for the particulate metal forms that are subjects of slow dissolution.

This PhD project aims to to improve ecotoxicity characterization by focusing on the chemical behavior of the metal emissions in the environment and make it directly applicable for emission inventories. This objective can be broken down into the following key aims:
• Estimate the ecotoxicity of metal emissions by addressing current data gaps in speciation modelling incorporating ecotoxicity advances in LCA.
• Improve the linkage between LCI and LCIA approaches for metal emissions by considering industry-relevant chemical forms, size distributions for different metals.