Life Cycle Assessment of Commercialized Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) for Emerging Technologies

Among the emerging technologies, polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), as a functional material, plays a critical role in the fluoropolymer market. PVDF is found in chemical processing, electricity and batteries, biomedical research, and wastewater management. These PVDF applications cover most present-day emerging technologies, which can be attributed to the outstanding physicochemical properties. With the global demand for PVDF in diverse technologies increasing significantly, the environmental impacts associated with the production of PVDF is imperative. Life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is a vital approach for the quantitative evaluation of the environmental impacts associated with any process, product, and technology. However, most previous LCA studies on emerging technologies have not accounted for PVDF in a scientifically rigorous. While compiling the life cycle inventory on PVDF, several kinds of surrogates were chosen to deal with, rather than establishing the new dataset for PVDF. Typically, it is the easiest and quickest way to fill LCI data gaps, but the impact assessment results are highly uncertain and unreliable. Due to the use of these unreliable surrogates, the global warming potential (GWP) calculated in the literature varies significantly with a difference of 59.6 kg CO2 eq between the highest and lowest estimates. For this reason, in this study, we create a life cycle assessment model for PVDF production according to commercialized synthesis pathway. With the use of the Ecoinvent 3.0 database and SimaPro, the obtained impacts computed in this paper are more precise with lower uncertainty. Notably, this is the first study to establish the life cycle inventory for PVDF and is an essential dataset for any LCA study quantifying environmental impacts for most emerging technologies.