Carlos Felipe Blanco

As a scientific leader of the team Sustainable Value Chains, I oversee the integration of different sustainability domains and disciplines to develop state-of-the-art models that provide holistic and actionable insights.

I also hold a position as Assistant Professor of Industrial Ecology at Leiden University, where I supervise PhD students and support courses in Life Cycle Assessment and Society’s Metabolism.

My core expertise is in sustainability assessment of emerging technologies, with a strong focus on the energy sector, particularly solar PV and batteries and the critical raw materials they require. In various publications I propose new methods and approaches to enhance the usefulness of Life Cycle Assessment, Social LCA and Ecological Risk Assessment to understand the potential sustainability implications of novel technologies and to guide innovation towards optimal sustainability outcomes.

• A prospective ecological risk assessment of high-efficiency III–V/silicon tandem solar cells
• Machine Learning to support prospective Life Cycle Assessment of emerging chemical technologies
• Assessing the sustainability of emerging technologies: A probabilistic LCA method applied to advanced photovoltaics
• A social life cycle assessment of vanadium redox flow and lithium-ion batteries for energy storage
• An integrated framework to assess impacts on ecosystem services in LCA demonstrated by a case study of mining in Chile