Copyright by Julia Marie O’Rourke 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Julia Marie O’Rourke Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: A New Paradigm for Evaluating Environmental Sustainability in a Complex Systems Context and Recommendations for Incorporating that Paradigm into Sustainable Design and LCA Committee: Carolyn Seepersad, Supervisor Dongmei Chen Richard Crawford Varun Rai Michael Webber A New Paradigm for Evaluating Environmental Sustainability in a Complex Systems Context and Recommendations for Incorporating that Paradigm into Sustainable Design and LCA by Julia Marie O’Rourke Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2017 Dedication To Hayley Acknowledgements I would like to thank: my husband, Pete, for his unwavering support, his belief in me, and the many sacrifices he made so that I could finish; my parents, Kathy and Kevin, for their love and encouragement, for maintaining an environment where I could be successful, and for their many hours of grandparenting; my grandparents – Mary, Edward, Francis, and RoseAnn – who taught me to value education, enjoy the journey, and work hard; my many teachers throughout the years, who showed me that science could be fun, who encouraged me to consider engineering and research, and who taught me how to teach myself; my friends, mentors, colleagues, and labmates, who inspired me, challenged me, and served as a sounding board for my ideas; my advisor, Dr. Seepersad, who believed in me and encouraged me to take advantage of every enrichment opportunity available, and whose support made this dissertation possible; and my committee members – Dr. Chen, Dr. Crawford, Dr. Rai, and Dr. Webber – for their thoughtful feedback. Finally, I would like to acknowledge support from a William Powers, Jr. Graduate Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Cockrell School of Engineering Recruitment Fellowship, a Leigh Family Endowed Graduate v Fellowship, the Pexa Education Trust, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Texas at Austin. vi A New Paradigm for Evaluating Environmental Sustainability in a Complex Systems Context and Recommendations for Incorporating that Paradigm into Sustainable Design and LCA Julia Marie O’Rourke, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisor: Carolyn Seepersad As consumers become increasingly eco-conscious, environmentally sustainable design has arisen to meet their demand for lower-impact products. Unfortunately, the sustainable design process as it is currently implemented often results in designs that do not ultimately result in reduced environmental damage. This occurs for a variety of reasons, including a failure to account for contextual factors and how they influence environmental impact, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, and the adoption of an overly-reductionist approach to addressing environmental problems, as will be argued in Chapter 9. The purpose of this research is to: (1) identify and discuss the problems in the current paradigm for sustainability that undermine efforts to address environmental issues via sustainable design; (2) propose a new paradigm for environmental sustainability and environmental impact that addresses the problems with the current paradigm and conceives of sustainability as an emergent property of a complex system composed of global energy and material flows; and (3) show how this new paradigm can be applied in practice to life cycle assessment (LCA) methods, the sustainable design process, efforts in eco- consumption, and research in related fields to more reliably address environmental problems. vii Chapters 1 through 4 introduce this work and provide background information related to LCA, scale and system boundaries, and network-related approaches to environmental impact assessment. Chapters 5 through 7 discuss context in LCA and sustainable design, namely, how contextual factors can affect the environmental impact associated with a given design and the environmental damage associated with a given impact, the implications of variability in impact due to contextual factors, and how other environmental impact measurement frameworks account for context. Chapters 8 and 9 present the current paradigm for environmental sustainability and problems with the reductionist approach. Chapter 10 presents a new paradigm for environmental sustainability as an emergent property of complex global systems; Chapter 11 presents a summary of findings, with examples; and Chapter 12 concludes. viii Table of Contents List of Tables ..................................................................................................... xxiii List of Figures ......................................................................................................xxv Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................1 1.1 Background ...............................................................................................1 1.2 Purpose ......................................................................................................2 1.3 Hypothesis.................................................................................................3 1.4 Dissertation Overview ..............................................................................3 1.4.1 Introduction and Background .......................................................4 1.4.2 Context in LCA and Sustainable Design ......................................4 1.4.3 The Current Paradigm for Sustainability ......................................5 1.4.4 The New Paradigm for Sustainability and Recommendations .....5 Chapter 2: Life Cycle Assessment ...........................................................................6 2.1 LCA Overview ..........................................................................................6 2.1.1 LCA Basics ...................................................................................6 2.1.2 LCA Phases ...................................................................................7 2.2 LCA Approaches ......................................................................................8 2.2.1 Process, Input-Output, and Hybrid LCA ......................................8 2.2.1.1 Process LCA .....................................................................8 2.2.1.2 Input-Output LCA .............................................................9 2.2.1.3 Hybrid LCA ....................................................................11 2.2.2 Attributional vs. Consequential LCA .........................................13 2.2.2.1 Attributional LCA ...........................................................13 2.2.2.2 Consequential LCA .........................................................14 2.2.2.3 Why does this distinction matter? ...................................15 2.3 Challenges Associated with Implementing LCA ....................................17 2.3.1 Subjectivity in LCA ....................................................................17 2.3.1.1 Goal and Scope ...............................................................17 2.3.1.2 Functional Unit ...............................................................18 ix 2.3.1.3 System Boundary ............................................................19 2.3.1.4 Timeframe .......................................................................20 2.3.1.5 Allocation ........................................................................20 2.3.1.6 Weighting ........................................................................22 2.3.2 Limited Applicability of LCA Results ........................................22 2.3.2.1 Uncertainty ......................................................................23 2.3.2.2 Difficult to Compare Studies and Apply Results to Other Problems ............................................................................24 2.3.2.3 LCA Cannot Show That One Product is Environmentally Superior to Another............................................................25 2.3.2.4 LCAs Do Not Predict Actual Environmental Impacts ....27 2.4 Conclusion ..............................................................................................29 Chapter 3: Scale and System Boundaries ..............................................................31 3.1 Scale ........................................................................................................31 3.1.1 What is Scale? .............................................................................31 3.1.2 The Effect of Scale on LCAs ......................................................32 3.1.3 Preference in LCA for Small-Scale Analyses .............................33 3.2 System Boundary ....................................................................................34 3.3 Conclusion ..............................................................................................36 Chapter 4: Network-Related Approaches to Environmental Assessment .............38 4.1 Industrial Ecology ...................................................................................38 4.2 Industrial Symbiosis and Eco-Industrial Parks .......................................39 4.3 Material Flow Analysis ...........................................................................41