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Life Cycle Assessment of Modern Mobility (Technologies) – Managing the Turnaround

A topical collection in Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This collection belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".

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Editor


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Guest Editor
Sustainable Mobility, Environmental Planning and Technology Faculty, University of Applied Sciences, Trier, Germany
Interests: sustainable mobility; electric vehicles; life cycle assessment; carbon footprinting; education for sustainable development (ESD); environmental impact assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Topical Collection Information

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable mobility is one of the mega topics of the current sustainability discussion and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Resource consumption and emissions increase in the transportation sector much faster than in other sectors, with no proven decoupling of economic and mobility growth. The number of cars, for example, has been increasing much faster than population growth for a long time. At the same time, population growth, the linked increase in mobility demand and a general trend for urbanization are seriously damaging the quality of life in cities. There is therefore an urgent need to look for alternatives both in technology and in the management of mobility.

On the other hand, there has never been a time with so many options and alternatives in development, particularly in connection with electrification. However, there can be, and have been, developments in the wrong direction. Therefore, we seriously need to evaluate new options with a full life cycle assessment (LCA) before decisions are made and funding strategies or subsidies are offered. Science needs to deliver appropriate and reliable data to ensure reasoned decisions.

For this Special Issue, we aim to collect papers on the LCA of new mobility technologies (such as micromobility) and alternatives in transportation management (such as vehicle sharing). In addition, there are still knowledge gaps, even with topics that have been intensively investigated, e.g., impact categories other than global warming and the detailed assignment of impacts within the life cycle of electric vehicles. New interactions with the energy infrastructure and the derived business models require the broader investigation of some systems, e.g., battery second use or vehicles in vehicle-to-home or vehicle-to-grid interactions.

Appropriate new methodological approaches and detailed scientific data are the preconditions for the sustainable transformation of our mobility systems and effective product and management optimization.

Prof. Dr. Eckard Helmers
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • life cycle assessment
  • electric vehicles
  • transportation modes
  • transportation management
  • sustainable mobility
  • micromobility
  • resource consumption
  • impact categories
  • vehicle-to-grid
  • vehicle-to-home interaction
  • batteries
  • battery second use

Published Papers (1 paper)

2022

29 pages, 3284 KiB  
Article
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Performance of Electric and Fossil-Fueled Passenger Vehicles with Uncertainty Estimates Using a Probabilistic Life-Cycle Assessment
by Robin Smit and Daniel William Kennedy
Sustainability 2022, 14(6), 3444; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063444 - 15 Mar 2022
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 4792
Abstract
A technology assessment is conducted for battery electric and conventional fossil-fueled passenger vehicles for three Australian scenarios and seven Australian states and territories. This study uses a probabilistic life-cycle assessment (pLCA) to explicitly quantify uncertainty in the LCA inputs and results. Parametric input [...] Read more.
A technology assessment is conducted for battery electric and conventional fossil-fueled passenger vehicles for three Australian scenarios and seven Australian states and territories. This study uses a probabilistic life-cycle assessment (pLCA) to explicitly quantify uncertainty in the LCA inputs and results. Parametric input distributions are developed using statistical techniques. For the 2018 Australian electricity mix, which is still largely fossil fuels based, the weight of evidence suggests that electric vehicles will reduce GHG emission rates by 29% to 41%. For the ‘fossil fuels only’ marginal electricity scenario, electric vehicles are still expected to significantly reduce emission rates by between 10% and 32%. Large reductions between 74% and 80% are observed for the more renewables scenario. For the Australian jurisdictions, the average LCA GHG emission factors vary substantially for conventional vehicles (364–390 g CO2-e/km), but particularly for electric vehicles (98–287 g CO2-e/km), which reflects the differences in fuel mix for electricity generation in the different states and territories. Electrification of the Tasmanian on-road fleet has the largest predicted fleet average reduction in LCA greenhouse gas emissions of 243–300 g CO2-e/km. A sensitivity analysis with alternative input distributions suggests that the outcomes from this study are robust. Full article
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