(348b) An Open-Access Gate-to-Gate Life Cycle Assessment for Graduate Researchers

As graduate students become masters of niche areas in narrow sub-disciplines, it is easy for them to lose sight of the bigger picture. Whether it’s the feasibility of the project, or potential impacts, it can be difficult for them to place their work in a larger context. Here we discuss a project-based research assessment for a graduate-level chemical engineering class using resources that may be freely used and adapted. Based off of a simplified Life Cycle Assessment, a materials and energy inventory, this excel based evaluation seeks to quantitatively assess the social, economic and ecological boons and burdens of their own research compared to industrial and academic processes in the literature. Performing cost, toxicity, and environmental analyses allows students to weigh the pros and cons of specific processes, and students learn that few decisions are simple to make. Next students evaluate their work and importantly, suggest possible improvements to the assessment itself. By conducting manageable and practical investigation of their own research, students learn how to contextualize their innovations and understand the relationship between how their choices in the laboratory can result in safer, cheaper, and more benign products and practices. Just as this evaluation is built on open access content and strengthened through iterative student and educator generated advances, simply put, this process is really an opportunity for students to dig into the data, as they mine the literature for a variety of parameters. Using technology to spur collaboration, and whole systems thinking, this project balances what young research would like to do, against what information is available, highlighting next steps. Understanding the nexus of energy, materials and people may seem to be a complex art, but by utilizing available materials to spark inquiry, it can be engineered into a craft.