Welcome to our new webinar series, Beyond Carbon, where we widen the perspective from greenhouse gas emissions to a broader set of environmental and social impacts. This is episode 5 where we focus on mineral resources.

Transitioning away from fossil fuels to clean energy is crucial for slowing down global warming. The shift, however, involves some major challenges, one of them being the increased need for mineral resources. Electric vehicles, battery energy storage systems (BESS), solar panels, electricity grids, all require minerals such as lithium, cobalt and copper. But what happens when finite resources face skyrocketing demand?

In this webinar, we will go beyond the frequently considered climate benefit of novel technologies and explore the consequences of mineral use. We will see that there are different perspectives on mineral resource use, which in turn influence how to assess mineral resource use along product life cycles. Different assessment methods can lead to notably different results, some of which are more relevant than others for different decision-making contexts.

The webinar contains a 30-minute presentation by Associate Professor Rickard Arvidsson, covering the relevance, hurdles and opportunities of assessing mineral resources in life cycle assessment (LCA), followed by 30 minutes of Q&A and discussions where you get to explore what the topic means in practice.

Presenter

Rickard Arvidsson is an Associate Professor at the Division of Environmental Systems Analysis at Chalmers University of Technology. His work in environmental and sustainability assessment is particularly focused on mineral extraction and battery materials.

More about the subject

Sonderegger, T., Berger, M., Alvarenga, R., Bach, V., Cimprich, A., Dewulf, J., Frischknecht, R., Guinée, J., Helbig, C., Huppertz, T., Jolliet, O., Motoshita, M., Northey, S., Rugani, B., Schrijvers, D., Schulze, R., Sonnemann, G., Valero, A., Weidema, B. P., & Young, S. B. (2020, 2020/04/01). Mineral resources in life cycle impact assessment—part I: a critical review of existing methods. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 25(4), 784-797

Berger, M., Sonderegger, T., Alvarenga, R., Bach, V., Cimprich, A., Dewulf, J., Frischknecht, R., Guinée, J., Helbig, C., Huppertz, T., Jolliet, O., Motoshita, M., Northey, S., Peña, C. A., Rugani, B., Sahnoune, A., Schrijvers, D., Schulze, R., Sonnemann, G., Valero, A., Weidema, B. P., & Young, S. B. (2020, 2020/02/11). Mineral resources in life cycle impact assessment: part II – recommendations on application-dependent use of existing methods and on future method development needs. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 25, 798-813.

Arvidsson, R., Söderman, M. L., Sandén, B. A., Nordelöf, A., André, H., & Tillman, A.-M. (2020). A crustal scarcity indicator for long-term global elemental resource assessment in LCA. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 25, 1805-1817.

This meeting is arranged within the project Innovation cluster for the life cycle perspective, funded by the Swedish Energy Agency and partners in Swedish Life Cycle Center.