(68a) Study on Life Cycle Assessment and Optimization of Pesticide Production Process from the Perspective of Sustainable Development

With the growing interest in sustainability management of the pesticide industry, coupled with the incompleteness of the life cycle assessment (LCA) framework in pesticides, it was imperative to conduct process-based life cycle assessment to support environmentally friendly optimization. Herein, the cradle-to-gate LCA of glyphosate production was executed as a case study to investigate its determinants and multiple environmental impacts during the production processes. Results showed that methanol had the highest environmental damage in toxicity with a normalized value of 85.7×10^-8, followed by coal-fired power in energy consumption with a value of 6.00×10^-8. Based on these results, the optimized LCAs were further performed including energy improvement and wastewater targeted conversion to reduce the environmental impact of the original process. Between them, the latter was more efficient with the normalized value decreasing by 21.10×10^-8 while that of the former only decreased by 6.50×10^-8. Moreover, the reliability of the data was verified via sensitivity analysis (SA) and uncertainty analysis (UA). Between them, the results of SA showed a high linear correlation as the correlation coefficients were all above 0.98, while the UA demonstrated significantly higher accuracy since the coefficient of variations based on the Monte Carlo simulation were far lower than those in the existing pesticide-LCAs. This study ultimately provided an integrated LCA framework of pesticide production from upstream control, offer ideas for optimized measures based on the processes, and further facilitate waste resource utilization and sustainable development.