System and Decision Science

LCA is a quantitative approach to evaluating the impacts of a product across its entire lifespan, from production to use to end of life. However, the accuracy and comparability of LCA results can be limited by inconsistent data and modeling approaches. To address this challenge, NIST is working with federal agencies and the broader LCA community to enhance standardization in LCA data and modeling, with the goal of increasing accuracy, transparency, and interoperability. Through collaborations with other federal agencies and the LCA community, NIST is identifying data gaps and informing future research priorities to support the development of more robust and comparable LCA results. 

Circular Economy LCA efforts include the following:

• Plastics: This activity assesses the current state of applying LCA to plastics to identify and target research and data gaps to improve the accuracy and transparency of life cycle evaluations. It also evaluates tools and databases that currently exist for completing LCAs for plastics to identify areas for improvement, including data and modeling gaps. Read more. Contact: Joshua Kneifel.
• Building products and systems: NIST develops and publishes life cycle assessment (LCA) models for building products and systems, including solar PV technologies, to facilitate consistent and transparent environmental assessments. Contact: Joshua Kneifel.
• Large-format batteries: NIST is developing life cycle assessment (LCA) models for large-format batteries to improve the standardization and comparability of LCA results. The project involves creating OpenLCA models with an initial focus on Li-NMC and LFP batteries, assessing the impact of onshoring and recycling on environmental performance, and identifying data gaps to inform future research and improve the trustworthiness of LCA results. Contact: Joshua Kneifel.

This activity focuses on developing measurement instruments, such as surveys, to understand consumer preferences and willingness to pay for emerging technologies and circular supply chains. 

Efforts include: 

• Agricultural Plastics Survey: NIST executed a survey to gather data on agricultural plastics usage and disposal. Read more. Contact: Julie Rieland and Christina Gore.
• Recycled Content in Plastic Goods Survey: NIST is in the process of completing a survey using a discrete choice experiment with information treatments to expand the measurement science of survey design methodologies and assess consumer perspectives and willingness to pay for recycled plastic content in consumer goods. Contact:  Christina Gore.
• Electric Vehicle Survey: This effort aims to understand consumer perspectives on electric vehicles (EVs), with a focus on battery performance. The project involves a consumer survey and analysis of the resulting data to provide insights into consumer attitudes and preferences regarding EVs. Contact:  Christina Gore.

This activity addresses economic and supply chain challenges and knowledge gaps critical for circular supply chain development.  NIST provides assessments as well as develops tools to support industry in analyzing supply and manufacturing aspects. Efforts include:

• Circular Economy Economics and Supply Chain Analysis:  NIST examined the economics of a circular economy, focusing on issues related to standards and technologies in a 2022 report and the current state of plastics recycling, manufacturing, usage, and waste handling in the United States in a 2024 report.  Contact: Douglas Thomas.
• Supply Chain Analysis Tool Development. NIST is developing a tool to estimate industry sector statistics up and down the supply chain based on economic input-output analysis. It is an expansion of the existing Manufacturing Cost Guide (MCG) tool. Contact: Douglas Thomas.
• Modeling Electric Vehicle Battery Life Cycle and Recovery: NIST is developing a reference model of electric vehicle battery recovery and recycling processes using the IDEF0 modeling language to support the development of effective end-of-life management strategies and promote battery circularity. Contact: Matthew Triebe

In order to create products intentionally designed to maximize resource efficiency, material recovery, and minimize waste throughout their entire lifecycle, key barriers must be overcome. These include a lack of insight into product design on potential impacts during future product life cycle stages, consensus on good practices for circular design and end-of-life options for products, and holistic methodologies to assess the success of a circular transition while managing tradeoffs. This project addresses these barriers through contributions to standards for circular product design (read more), the establishment and deployment of circularity metrics that address environmental, economic, and social performance at the design stage of products and circular life cycle networks, and the development of computational methods that can facilitate circular design and support life cycle approaches to systems engineering. The project focuses on battery and energy storage, consumer electronics, and integrated circuits (ICs or semiconductor chips). Read more. Contact: Ashley Hartwell.

This activity identifies critical material and information pathways to support the development of closed-loop product systems. The goal is to establish reliable sources of secondary material feedstocks and prevent critical resources from ending up in landfills by using material recovery strategies like reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling. By focusing on critical materials in microelectronics and energy technologies, the project aims to: 

• Enable the recovery of manufacturing byproducts and post-consumer goods
• Diversify raw material supplies, reducing reliance on primary resources,
• Create profitable secondary markets, leading to new business opportunities 

This activity will produce decision support tools, metrics, reference models, and contribute to the development of standards. Read more. Contact: Nehika Mathur.

One of the most challenging aspects of creating circular products is identifying the trade-offs across alternative materials and processes by which products are made at the appropriate point in the production process.  This effort is developing a new ontology-based standard to enable a more precise and optimized analysis of biomanufacturing process design, such that life cycle impacts can be accounted for during the creation of new products. Such analysis requires integration of both life cycle and economic data from multiple sources and diverse characterizations into a common form to be merged with domain-specific knowledge during the design of a new process. An ontology standard is a unique tool that assists in such multi-dimensional data aggregation, allowing for integration and analysis of both data and domain knowledge. Lack of such a tool hinders engineers from objectively comparing process alternatives against both technoeconomic and lifecycle goals.  Contact: Boonserm Kulvatunyou 

The Advanced Data Exchange Standards for the Biomanufacturing Supply Chain project is a related effort that aims to help U.S. biomanufacturers reduce the time and cost associated with making supply chain data accessible for better supply chain planning and resilience. 

Material recovery facilities (MRFs) are increasingly applying advanced technologies to improve the accuracy and speed of materials sortation and to reduce the reliance on manual sorting. This has included the application of advanced (e.g., AI-based) identification as well as robotic separation systems. This activity aims to understand challenges facing the use of robotics and advanced AI-based sorting systems in MRFs and identify opportunities for NIST to contribute. Contact: Kelsea Schumacher.