ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Systems Engineering
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1646009
Industry-wide life cycle assessment for improved decision-making: A case study on carbon emissions of petrochemicals
Provisionally accepted
- 1Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
- 2Rheinisch-Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Aachen, Germany
- 3Carbon Minds GmbH, Cologne, Germany
- 4TNO, The Hague, Netherlands
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Emission reduction in the petrochemical industry is essential to meet climate targets, as the chemical industry is a major contributor to industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) allows for assessing the environmental impacts of alternative production pathways. Still, interlinked industries, such as the petrochemical industry, are difficult to assess in LCA due to the so-called multifunctionality problem. To this end, there are at least two options in LCA to assess industry-wide emissions: a products-wise approach and a product basket-wise approach. Here, we show that optimized technology decisions differ between the two approaches. Optimizing supply chains product-wise leads to 20% to 155% higher greenhouse gas emissions compared to a product basket-wise optimization due to (1) a higher amount of by-products, (2) increased raw material need and processing, and (3) suboptimal technology decisions in the supply chain. In contrast to that, a product basket-wise approach is able to adapt in response to changes in demand. Therefore, this approach has advantages over a product-wise assessment due to its possibility to simultaneously assess multifunctional processes. On the other hand, it might also require a complex model and more data.
Keywords: life cycle assessment (LCA), decision-making, allocation, multifunctionality, carbon emissions
Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 14 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Enking, Cucurachi, Meys and TUKKER. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jana Elisabeth-Anna Enking, j.e.enking@cml.leidenuniv.nl
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