Author Description

Depletion is the concept underpinning one of the most widely applied approach to account for the impacts associated with mineral and metal resource use in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) step. The extraction of a resource from the Earth's crust implies the reduction of the corresponding geological stocks, and is considered to subsequently contribute to this resource depletion. During the Environmental Footprint (EF) pilot phase (2013-2018), the concept of resources (or materials) dissipation after their use in the technosphere has been increasingly called for being considered as a potential better way to account for (abiotic) resources in an EF context. The international community has started investigating further the concept of resource dissipation applied to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and, still, there is currently no common understanding of what a dissipative flow is, if this has implications on how to define the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) of a process, nor there is an accepted LCIA model to be applied to dissipative flows. This report provides a literature review of existing studies in different disciplines regarding resource dissipation. Furthermore, it provides an approach on how to deal with resource dissipation at the LCI and LCIA levels. The proposed approaches were tested in case studies. Moreover, the report addresses another aspects so far not properly developed in LCIA: the impact associated to the use of naturally occurring biotic resources and a proposal for the characterization thereof. The results of this study cannot be integrated "as is" in an EF context: when considering abiotic and biotic resources still some further work is needed both at LCI and LCIA levels. However, for what concerns biotic, a list of elementary flows that can be integrated in EF is provided. Nevertheless, this work constitutes the basis for further developments by researchers and method developers for a possible consideration for implementation in an EF context. As a ne