(565d) Chemical Accounting with an Open-Access Life Cycle Inventory for Graduate Researchers

Budding researchers are challenged with the daunting task of understanding and analyzing their work in the broad context of the literature. Life cycle inventories (LCIs) serve to categorize resources, map their flow, and evaluate products and processes. These interdisciplinary tools aggregate data to analyze environmental and socioeconomic impacts. They may be used to compare research, highlight areas for improvement and identify potential obstacles. Used widely in industry, many techniques leverage proprietary data and software that acts as a black box. Open-access materials allow for LCIs to be made widely available to students and they may be edited and customized to suit distinct research questions. The analyses can address topics including toxicity, global warming potential, cost, atom economy, and change between iterations. Piloted in a graduate seminar and with summer research students, an excel based LCI proved useful in helping students organize and better understand their work, compare it to the literature, and help suggest next steps. As they are functionally similar to the pre-lab found in undergraduate classrooms, LCIs are important systems to compartmentalize and contextualize data to help students become scholars.