Elisa Seddon, PhD

Technical Fellow, Lubrizol Corporation

Friday, September 1, 2023

9:30 AM

102 Benedum Hall

Host: Mohammad Masnadi

Life Cycle Assessment, A Perspective on Sustainability

 from the Chemicals Industry

Abstract: “Sustainability” is a word packed with meaning that behaves like a kaleidoscope when viewed from different perspectives. Ultimately, for a product or process to be sustainable, it should efficiently use materials and energy and should not deplete critical resources or harm people or the planet, while providing a valuable benefit to society. Depending on the market though, those individual elements can shake out in many different ways. For example, the automotive market focuses on tailpipe emissions while the beauty sector values biological content and biodegradability, where the emphasis on life cycle stage can vary from cradle to in-use to end-of-life. Lubrizol is a unique company that provides specialty chemical products to other businesses in a wide variety of markets, so developing a “sustainable product” for our customers is not simple, but becomes more possible by applying the principles of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This seminar will give some background on LCA and showcase how it can be used in new product development in an industrial chemistry setting.

Bio: Dr. Elisa Seddon is a Technical Fellow at the Lubrizol Corporation, where she has been employed since graduating from Indiana University with a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry in 2000. She is currently responsible for integrating Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into the backbone of Lubrizol’s product and process development activities, and guides a cross-functional team along the path to better understanding and mitigating the largest sources of a product’s footprint, looking both upstream and within the corporate gates. Elisa is also involved with a number of collaborative efforts to harmonize LCA modeling, including work on the American Petroleum Institute’s best practices for Lubricants Life Cycle Assessment and Carbon Footprinting.