Insights into Sustainability from complexity analysis of Life Cycle Networks: A case study on Gasoline and Bio-Fuel Networks

The traditional Life Cycle Assessment(LCA) methods study a static snapshot of resource flow or emissions in life cycle networks by utilizing aggregated environmental metrics. It is likely that these networks can provide additional insight about the sustainability of systems that is currently not captured by any of the aggregated metrics. This includes insights such as resilience, vulnerability and many more, which motivates exploration of methods that can extract such information from these networks. This article focuses on applying the network analysis approach to life cycle networks to obtain additional insights about the sustainability of systems. Network analysis of corn-ethanol & gasoline network shows that one fuel is not consistently better over the other and several metrics need to be combined to gauge the true risks associated with each fuel. Results also show that two fuels will require different management strategies based on critical path (as indicated by degree strengths) in case of particular resource disruption. Further flow structure shows that current economy needs to integrate recycling strategies within structure of economy for various resources which is missing. The strengths and limitations of some of those methods for Input Output Life Cycle networks is also highlighted.