Life Cycle Environmental Impact Assessment of Epoxidized Sucrose Soyate: A Soy-Based Adhesive

In the past few decades, the demand for renewable and sustainable polymeric materials has significantly grown due to 1) their ability to provide enhanced material functionality, and 2) increasing environmental and health concerns from fossil-based products. Epoxidized vegetable oils and their derivatives can provide alternative sources for petroleum-based resins. Among epoxidized vegetable oil-based resins, epoxidized sucrose soyate (ESS) has shown promises in significantly enhancing the mechanical properties as an adhesive. Though inherently biobased, it is essential to ensure these resins can offer a more sustainable alternative compared to their petroleum-based counterparts.

Our study focuses on investigating the environmental performance of the ESS resins. We use laboratory and pilot-scale data to model the process of preparing ESS resin in industrial-scale and use life cycle assessment (LCA) method to assess the environmental impacts of making this resin. We use SimaPro software and TRACI 2 method (including ten environmental impact categories e.g. global warming) to build our LCA model and compare the environmental performance of ESS with commercially available petroleum-based epoxy resins. Our results show that ESS resins demonstrate a better environmental performance in almost all investigated categories.

Our results will provide decision-making information for its commercialization as well as allow us to identify hotspots in the production process and recommend possible synthesis improvements that can help this novel resin compete with commercially available resins in the market. To our best of knowledge, this is the first research that investigates the environmental impacts of ESS.