As part of the pro­ject, the lub­ric­ant for­mu­la­tions and thicken­ers developed are tested for their eco­lo­gic­al foot­print under aer­obic conditions.

To do this, we use the life cycle assess­ment meth­od­o­logy defined in the inter­na­tion­al stand­ards ISO 14040 and 14044.

A major chal­lenge is the early assess­ment of pro­cesses that are still under devel­op­ment. In this pro­ject, we util­ise expert assess­ments and sim­u­la­tions in order to carry out a real­ist­ic eval­u­ation.

Today, plastic emis­sions into the envir­on­ment are not taken into account in life cycle assess­ments. Fraunhofer UMSICHT has developed a meth­od to estim­ate the poten­tial envir­on­ment­al impacts of plastic emis­sions based on their degrad­a­tion time in the envir­on­ment: Meth­od­o­logy to address poten­tial impacts of plastic emis­sions in life cycle assess­ment | The Inter­na­tion­al Journ­al of Life Cycle Assessment

The pro­ject is invest­ig­at­ing wheth­er the data col­lec­ted on degrad­ab­il­ity can be included in the eco­lo­gic­al assessment.