Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Emerging Sustainable Materials, Processes and Technologies
A Special Issue of Clean Technologies (ISSN 2571-8797).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2027 | Viewed by 228
Editors
Interests: prospective LCA; consequential LCA; carbon footprint; biomass valorization; green chemistry; uncertainty in LCA
Interests: prospective LCA; eco-design; engineering design; systematic innovation; patent analysis; AI; LLM
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: chemistry for the environment and for cultural heritage; green chemistry; life cycle assessment (LCA); social life cycle assessment (S-LCA); safe and sustainable by design (SSbD); innovative and bio-based materials; circular economy; resource recovery and waste management
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Emerging materials, processes and technologies are increasingly expected to be sustainable from the outset, well before commercial deployment. Yet their environmental performance is hardest to quantify when it matters most: at low technology readiness levels (TRL), where conventional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is challenged by data scarcity, uncertain scale-up pathways and rapidly evolving performance. Anticipating these impacts early has become a shared goal of responsible innovation worldwide, reflected in frameworks such as Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD). LCA, particularly in its prospective variant, has therefore become a key methodology for supporting sustainable innovation and decision-making. This Special Issue welcomes original articles, reviews and communications advancing the life cycle evaluation of emerging sustainable materials, processes and technologies across all sectors, from green chemistry, chemical processes and sustainable materials to low-carbon energy, industrial decarbonization, water and waste treatment, and the circular economy. Topics of interest include prospective and ex-ante LCA methodologies; scale-up and upscaling models; knowledge-based inventory development through patents, scientific literature, text mining, artificial intelligence and large language models; uncertainty analysis; the integration of LCA with eco-design, SSbD and green-chemistry metrics; and the coupling of LCA with circularity or techno-economic indicators. Both methodological advances and well-documented case studies are warmly encouraged.
Dr. Alessandro Marson
Dr. Christian Spreafico
Dr. Daniele Cespi
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Clean Technologies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- life cycle assessment (LCA)
- prospective LCA
- AI/LLM-based inventory
- emerging materials
- eco-design
- green chemistry
- scale-up
- circular economy
- safe and sustainable by design (SSbD)
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