Prospective Life Cycle Assessment Based on Patent Analysis to Support Eco-design

Eco-design has increasingly become a necessity to safeguard the eco-system. However, eco-assessment methodologies, e.g. the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), fail to rigorously and reliably support the evaluation of future products, as well as emerging technologies, ideas and concepts in eco-design. This study lays some theoretical foundations for the development of a step-divided systematic method to support Prospective LCA based on a structured patent analysis. In order to answer the prescribed requirements, for each of them, some specific strategies of patents analysis have been collected and systematically organized. The aim of the proposed method is to compare technologies with a different level of maturity, contrary to the traditional LCA which overestimates the existing ones only because are more optimized. The proposed method was applied to a real case study about the production of titanium powder to perform the prospective LCA of the patented future developments of the components of this process. The results showed that, patent analysis, systematized through the proposed method, can be used to forecast the environmental impact of a future product. The scale-up of the performances can be esteemed, by ensuring at the same time the comparability and the reliability and the results, as prescribed by reference standards.