From Sustainable Innovation to Sustainable Impact: Scale-Up, Life-Cycle Assessment and Techno-Economic Evaluation

Abstract

Technologies are increasingly described as green, bio-based, circular, low-carbon, resource-efficient, or sustainable before their system-level consequences are known. Such labels can be useful hypotheses, but they are not evidence. This editorial argues that sustainability claims require quantitative evaluation of environmental burdens, material and energy flows, scale-up behaviour, and economic feasibility relative to realistic alternatives. Life-cycle assessment, carbon accounting, material-flow analysis, techno-economic analysis, process simulation, water and energy balances, sensitivity analysis, and uncertainty analysis provide complementary tools, but their conclusions depend on system boundaries, functional units, allocation rules, data quality, geographic context, market assumptions, and scale. Emerging technologies are especially difficult because laboratory data must be extrapolated toward uncertain industrial configurations. Research priorities should therefore include prospective life-cycle assessment, scale-up-aware modelling, harmonized inventories, regionalized evaluation, transparent uncertainty analysis, integrated environmental-economic optimization, and validation against pilot or commercial evidence. Sustainable impact should be claimed only when results remain credible across plausible scenarios and when comparisons use realistic incumbent technologies rather than idealized baselines.