Fig. 5: Life cycle impact assessment of two scenarios.
From: Regenerating end-of-life membranes for enhanced sustainability and unexpected performance
a Schematic diagram of LCA system boundaries describing polymer production, membrane preparation, membrane regeneration and disposal processes in this study. b Relative impacts of two scenarios across all impact categories. The first group is related to common ecosystem and human health, including climate change (CC), ozone depletion (OD), ionizing radiation (IR), fine particulate matter formation (FPMF), photochemical oxidant formation: ecosystem quality (POFE), photochemical oxidant formation: human health (POFH), terrestrial acidification (TA), freshwater eutrophication (FE) and marine eutrophication (ME). The second group is related to toxic effect, including terrestrial ecotoxicity (TET), freshwater ecotoxicity (FET), marine ecotoxicity (MET), human toxicity: cancer (HTC) and human toxicity: non-cancer (HTNC). The third group is related to resource and energy consumption, including land use (LU), water use (WU), mineral resource scarcity (MRS) and fossil resource scarcity (FRS). The normalized 100% impacts are impacts of the traditional linear scenario. c Contributions of electricity, solvent and others to carbon emissions of each scenario during the process. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
