This text is part of the special notebook 150 years of Polytechnique Montréal
Founded in 2001 at Polytechnique Montréal, the International Reference Center for Life Cycle Analysis and Sustainable Transition (CIRAIG) has developed valuable scientific knowledge in responsible consumption. Enough to help companies and states achieve their carbon neutrality objective.
Making commitments to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 is great. But we still need to be able to effectively respond to this noble ambition, without losing too much time along the way. As such, life cycle analysis (LCA) has a major role to play in making it possible to evaluate, as precisely as possible, the potential effects of a product or service on the environment and society. .
In this area, CIRAIG has a lot to teach us. With more than 20 years of expertise, the center attached to Polytechnique Montréal has implemented valuable tools that take into account the entire industrial process (from the extraction of raw materials to the end of life of a product ), such as the different sustainability challenges (from climate change to effects on biodiversity).
“Our models are constantly evolving,” explains Anne-Marie Boulay, associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal and deputy general director of CIRAIG. “There are impacts which have been ignored in the past and which had to be integrated. Water consumption and the use of plastics have not always been taken into account in the LCA. So, in recent years, we have thought about how to integrate them into our comparative analyses. »
Validate good ideas
Since its creation, CIRAIG has worked with the Ministry of the Economy, Innovation and Energy and carried out significant studies for Hydro-Québec, such as that on the life cycle of electric and conventional vehicles in the context Quebecois. The objective was to quantify the ecological footprint of the former compared to the latter. And it was established that electric models had a larger footprint upon purchase than conventional vehicles, but significantly less after having traveled 300,000 km.
“CIRAIG has developed cutting-edge expertise to make it applicable to business needs and help ensure that what seems like a good idea on paper really is a good idea over time,” underlines Pierre-Olivier Roy, environmental expertise advisor II at Hydro-Québec. “LCA allows us to have a truly global vision, like the electric vehicle which reduces emissions during use, but increases them at the production level. »
Last April, Polytechnique Montréal and CIRAIG, with the University of Quebec at Montreal, launched the International Research Consortium on Life Cycle Analysis and Sustainable Transition aimed at implementing strategies to accelerate the transition to carbon neutrality. Researchers from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne and the Specialized School of Western Switzerland have embarked on the project, as well as industrialists, such as ArcelorMittal and Hydro-Québec, long-time partners of CIRAIG, L’Oréal, LVMH, Michelin, the OCP Group, the Optel Group, Richemont, Solvay and TotalEnergies.
“We have technology meetings twice a year,” says Anne-Laure Hettinger, director of the Global R&D and Sustainability Department within the ArcelorMittal group. “For the last meeting, we organized a seminar on ways to take biodiversity into account in our indicators. We believe that water management and biodiversity management will become subjects as important as climate change. And these are things that manufacturers can work on with CIRAIG. »
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