Completed NRP 73 research project: Open assessment of Swiss economy and society

 

To gain a better understanding of the effects of private consumption and Swiss supply chains, we developed a new approach that can be used to assess the country-specific impact of supply interruptions in a supply chain. The approach was applied in a case study of electric vehicles sold in Switzerland. The case study evaluated hotspots and the overall impact of supply interruptions in the cobalt and aluminium supply chains. Several materials or processes had already been largely researched, such as cobalt extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, new critical processes, such as aluminium cable harness production in Morocco, were also investigated. The interruption of global supply chains for apparently commonplace materials during the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates the usefulness of this approach.

Furthermore, we are combining a top-down database with a bottom-up database on the energy and materials cycle to create a complete, detailed picture of supply chains and their impact on the environment. An open-source approach was used to amalgamate life-cycle inventory databases and applied to ecoinvent and EXIOBASE. Linking a complete but highly aggregated database with detailed process models covering certain areas of the economy has supplied the best overall picture to date of the environmental impact of Swiss households’ consumption and made it possible to prioritise future measures to improve data quality. 

The global sensitivity analysis shows that there is an urgent need for better inventory models and high-quality uncertainty data. Sensitivity analyses should be applied to all life-cycle assessments and data quality should be improved iteratively by means of revised statistical models and geographic disaggregation. Several databases with diverse basic data should be used if possible. Indicators of resource criticality based on open data can be computed for detailed supply chains.
 

 

• Kim, Aleksandra; Mutel, Christopher; Froemelt, Andreas (2022). Robust high-dimensional screening
   
• Paulillo, Andrea; Kim, Aleksandra; Mutel, Christopher; Striolo, Alberto; Bauer, Christian; Lettieri, Paola (2021). Influential parameters for estimating the environmental impacts of geothermal power: A global sensitivity analysis study

 

Dr. Christoper Mutel
Paul Scherrer Institute
+41 56 310 57 87
christopher.mutel@psi.ch