Published by Communcation Officer Trine Dalsgaard Rasmussen on behalf of the ALIGNED Project, Department of Planning

ALIGNED is led by Aalborg University and formed by twelve partners from seven countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Switzerland. The AAU-team from DCEA, consists of Professor Massimo Pizzol as the coordinator, Associate Professor Søren Løkke as co-PI, Assistant Professor Agneta Ghose is lead for the pulp and paper sector (WP5), Karen Nørgaard Bollesen is research assistant and Flora Champetier from AAU Innovation is the administrative project manager.

The current methods used to evaluate the impact of bio-based products give inconsistent and incomparable results. This hinders decision-making processes, negatively impacting the transition to a sustainable economy.

By bringing together scientific and industrial knowledge, the goal of ALIGNED is to provide a systematic evidence-based methodology for decision-making to improve the sustainability performance of present and future bio-based industries.

ALIGNED will refine modelling practices, fill data gaps, and develop new methods to reach a harmonized assessment framework for bio-based products. The models and tools developed in ALIGNED will allow the delivery of high-quality assessment studies across five bio-based sectors: construction, woodworking, textile, pulp and paper, and bio-chemicals.

For the next 36 months, the twelve consortium partners will join forces to advance the scientific field of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and collaborate with industries and representatives from the abovementioned bio-based sectors.

The need for harmonization

Current LCA practices are very fragmented. Even the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) framework, that the European Commission plans to use as a common denominator for the high number of different green claims and labels, has produced results that lack comparability across sectors. In addition, there are incompatibility problems with the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) system and the European Ecolabel.

Despite these problems, the LCA method is strong in giving quantitative evaluations of specific products and activities, but the results are heavily dependent on the numbers and assumptions being applied during modelling. Therefore, it is not surprising that a core need related to life-cycle assessment is the harmonisation of methods.

ALIGNED has received €3.4 million funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme.

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