Reconfigurations of Life Cycle Assessment: Valuing Life over Lithium [ASEE Conference Paper]
A major problem with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is that the results can lead us to believe that certain technological choices are “good” for the environment, based solely on a quantitative comparison among negative impacts. How we contextualize and interpret the results of LCA matters for orienting environmental education and policymaking toward true sustainability.
Dr. Joey Valle, postdoctoral fellow with ASPIRE at Purdue, led a team of researchers in tracing LCA’s history and critiquing its application to the topic of electric vehicle environmental impacts. Our paper, “Reconfigurations of Life Cycle Assessment: Valuing Life over Lithium” was presented at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.
Download, read, and cite the full conference paper here: https://peer.asee.org/reconfigurations-of-life-cycle-assessment-valuing-life-over-lithium
Abstract
Within much of dominant engineering education that focuses on sustainability, a narrative exists that electric vehicles are a seemingly universal good in combating climate change. Common sense within dominant engineering culture has been constructed to frame lithium as a critical element in ‘green’ energy storage that underpins U.S. based technological moves away from fossil fuels. The analytic of life cycle assessment (LCA), as a technique that purports to account for the environmental aspects associated with a ‘product’ over its life cycle, is often used to generate the data legitimizing these narratives. Yet the accountings LCA offers obscure much of the context any analyzed product is situated within. Taking an exemplary focus on the drive toward transportation electrification via lithium based energy storage technologies, this work in progress paper looks into death-making onto-epistemic underpinnings and metanarratives LCA provides cover for. Here, an interwoven framework of abolition, degrowth, and environmental justice is offered as a lens to analyze what maintains present constructions of LCA. Focusing on LCAs of lithium ion batteries (LIB)s offers a window into the constructions of symbolic life advanced in dominant engineering. Deconstructing the foundations of this death-making understanding of life as product in LCA offers a basis for reorienting engineering education involving LCA toward non-dominant narratives rooted in the affirmation of life.
Figure 1: a) Construction of validity for LCA, where increasing the number of harder-to-quantify system components and metrics for evaluation is believed to better represent the reality of LCA targets; b) LCA creates a focus on specificity and thus misses complex realities, despite a clearly defined quantitative target.
