Towards sustainable chemical process design: Revisiting the integration of life cycle assessment

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is essential for sustainable chemical process design. However, current integrations treat LCA as a top-level environmental assessment tool, risking superficial integration and perpetuating conventional process design assumptions. This contribution reviews how LCA is integrated with model-based chemical process design. It focuses on current practices, challenges in goal and scope, modelling, computational, and interpretation integration, and discusses the integration of LCA's core features alongside profit-driven assumptions. The contribution identified more than 100 articles via a hybrid search method and reviewed 53 based on a saturation curve, resulting in 25 metrics to assess process design and LCA integration. To assist practitioners, a comprehensive classification of computational integrations is provided. The review highlights the following gaps: most studies (74%) focus only on cradle-to-gate phases, neglect use and end-of-life phases (89%) and do not define the function (92%). However, including a user function perspective could enhance the integration of use and end-of-life scenarios, supporting circular strategies and sufficiency measures. Additionally, environmental externalities are systematically excluded during model linkage, and most studies concentrate on energy utilities (75%) and material inputs (70%), whereas emissions (26%), waste, and wastewater (25%) are frequently overlooked, which emphasises the dominance of economic factors in current design studies. • Detailed overview of LCA and chemical process design integration. • Computational integration support for practitioners. • Modelling and linking challenges when accounting for externalities. • Designing for circularity, end-of-life, and use by integrating function perspective. • Contextualising integration in paradigm shift towards sustainable process design.