EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Resilient supply chains are of high relevance for the sustainability of systems. Their supply chains are often complex and exposed to a variety of risks potentially causing supply disruptions. An example of a recent supply disruption event is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused supply disruption within the global supply chains of, for example, battery electric vehicles. Existing criticality assessment approaches for raw materials allow for evaluating potential supply disruption impacts, but mostly for the early supply chain stages only. Here, an integration of the raw material criticality assessment into a Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) framework would provide the opportunity to assess supply disruption impacts along the complete product supply chain. However, no suitable methods yet exist. In the framework of an on-going Swiss National research project, a life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method integrated within an LCSA framework is developed that allows to identify hotspots of supply disruption impacts along the complete supply chain of product systems consumed within a specific country. These country-specific process flows are multiplied with respective regionalized characterization factors (CFs) to determine category indicator results for different supply disruptions at each supply chain process. These CFs are calculated in a transparent and reproducible way and comprise suitable, quantitative indicator for supply disruption probability and vulnerability.
In the frame of this presentation, this novel LCIA method is applied to the supply chain of cobalt embodied in battery electric vehicles used in Switzerland. Impacts of supply disruptions related to, for example, political instability, trade barriers or social policy restrictions are assessed along this complete supply chain on a short-term perspective. Based on the category indicator results visualized within a two-dimensional matrix, hotspots of the supply disruption impacts are identified.