At Reflow Maritime, we advocate the circular economy as the number one approach to facilitate sustainable practices, while still ensuring growth and development. It has been proven from other industries that the Circular Economy can be used to grow revenue streams, gain new market shares, create jobs while decreasing the use of scarce resource and greenhouse gas emissions. Circular economy refers to a process where you design out the final waste stage, in order to keep materials in use endlessly, where products are designed to last, to be remanufactured, and if needed to be repurposed in a second life cycle. The circular economy is the counterpart to the linear economy, where product lines are defined as ‘produced – In use – Disposed’. The circular economy is an uproar against overexploitation of the scarce natural resources, and are presenting new business models where both economic growths can be enabled while decreasing the exploitation and disposal of valuable resources.

The three principles of circular economy

Design out waste and pollution
So much of the waste created today can be traced back to decisions made in the design stage. Rather than treating the symptoms of pollution and finding ways to deal with waste once it’s generated they’ve designed their businesses so that waste or pollution isn’t created in the first place.

Keep products and materials in use
A circular economy favors activities that preserve value in the form of energy, labor, and materials. This means designing for durability, reuse, remanufacturing and recycling to keep products, components, and materials circulating in the economy. Circular systems make effective use of bio-based materials by encouraging many different uses for them as they cycle between the economy and natural systems.

Regenerate natural systems
In nature, there is no concept of waste, everything is food for something else, a leaf falls from the tree and feeds the forest. What if we aspired not to do just less bad, but better? By returning valuable nutrients to the soil, we can enhance natural resources.

Source: Ellen McArthur Foundation

LCA stands for Life Cycle Assessment and refers to an assessment of a given component’s life cycle. LCA is a method on how to calculate the environmental impact and use of resources related to the total lifespan of an item. LCA can be used to get an in-depth insight in the production of an item, going back to the extraction of raw materials, to the energy input, water consumption, etc. used to produce the item, all the way to the disposal of the component, including the use stage and the cases of repairs, remanufacturing and refurbishments. An LCA can, therefore, be used to evaluate and identify the environmental impact on items, related to decision making, both political and industrial.

For ReFlow LCA Consultancy, the ISO / ILCD approach for the proper execution of the LCA will be applied according to the European Commission’s recommendations. This divides both projects into the following structure (taking from the ILCD framework); goal definition, scope definition, inventory analysis, and impact assessment.

The first phase of the LCA is goal definition, which addresses the putative use of the life cycle analysis e.g. what should the results be used for, assumptions in connection with the chosen method and any limitations, the reason for the analysis and decision context, the target group of the analysis, possibly comparative studies as well as influencing factors in relation to project actors. The second phase (scope definition), addresses the purpose of the analysis; including the product, its functional unit, and the reference flow for the analysis. Furthermore, the LCI modeling framework is addressed as well as the handling of multifunctional processes, system delineation, and foreground and background systems, argumentation for the basis for impact assessment, and the technological, temporal, and geographical representativeness of the analysis. Inventory analysis is the third phase of the LCA, where the production system is modeled and elementary flow data is collected for all processes in the system and scaled according to the reference flow of the analysis. In the final phase of the LCA, the system’s inventory and elementary flows are modeled so that the output can be translated into the potential contribution of the individual environmental impact category modeled for in the analysis.

Bill of material (BOM)
The bill of materials (BOM) supports the construction of the LCI and is a comprehensive list of parts, items, assemblies, sub-assemblies, production processes, and raw materials needed to produce one unit of the final product. The BOM acts as the “recipe” or a shopping list of a specific product including instructions on how to produce and assemble the product and sub-components from various parts. Usually, the BOM is constructed as a hierarchy with the final product displayed at the top level, and materials and components at the bottom level, outlining the quantity of each item needed to complete one unit of the item higher ion the hierarchy.

Cradle-to-gate
is a system boundary condition considering all activities in a product’s manufacturing stage ranging from the extraction of materials, transportation, refining, processing and fabrication of components and subcomponents till the point of leaving the factory where it was manufactured.

Cradle-to-grave
is a system boundary condition considering all activities in a product’s life cycle including the cradle-to-gate condition, transportation throughout its lifecycle, the use-stage, maintenance of the product, and the end-of-life processes e.g. disposal.

Cradle-to-cradle
is a system boundary condition that moves beyond the cradle-to-grave condition shifting from a linear life cycle to a circular lifecycle. For the cradle-to-cradle condition, the product design ensures that the product can be reused or recycled at the end-of-life stage hence avoiding a linear disposal scenario thus introducing the product in another life cycle.

ISO / ILCD
ISO refers to European Standards and more specifically ISO 14040:2006 and 14044:2006. The ISO 14040:2006 – Environmental management – Life cycle assessment – Principles and framework act as the overall principles for creating the LCA framework. The ISO 14044:2006 – Environmental management – Life cycle assessment – Requirements and guidelines details the requirements for conducting an LCA specifying each element of the LCA: Goal definition, scope definition, life cycle inventory, and impact assessment. Both ISO’s acts as national standards for all European countries.
The International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook is a tool created by the European Commission to ensure best practice in LCA by providing government and businesses with a technical basis to derive product-specific criteria, guides, and simplified tools for hereby assuring quality and consistency of life cycle data, methods, and assessments.

Life cycle inventory (LCI)
The life cycle inventory phase is defined as the data collection phase accounting for everything involved in the lifecycle of the system or product assessed. The LCI is constructed from detailed tracking of all in- and output flows including raw materials and resource usage, energy and water use, and emissions to air, water, and soil/land by the specific substance. LCI is often extremely complex and may involve large amounts of individual unit processes such as resource extraction, numerous primary and secondary production processes, various transportation scenarios, and a vast amount of tracked substances which makes the inventory build-up a very time-consuming life cycle stage. Source: Athena Sustainable Materials Institute

LCA modelling tool
SimaPro is a life cycle assessment tool that collects, analyses, and monitors the sustainability performance data of a product, system, or service. It is one of the world’s leading LCA tools with its 30-year reputation in both industry and academia in more than 80 countries. SimaPro acts as a science-based information source, providing transparency and avoiding black-box processes when modelling and analysing life cycle stages of a product or system to assess environmental impacts. Furthermore, SimaPro identifies hotspots in every link of the supply chain, from extraction of raw materials to manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal and can be used in a variety of applications such as sustainability reporting, carbon footprint calculation, product design, generating environmental product declarations and determining key performance indicators.