A review about methods for supporting failure risks analysis in eco‑assessment

This paper critically reviewed 106 scientifc papers proposing methods to enrich ecoassessment with failure determination and risk assessment. The provided research perspective is new and signifcantly diferent from the reviews in the literature which are mostly limited to analyse the environmental impacts of uncertainties and of-design functioning rather than the failures. The analysis, based on the contributions of the literature over more than 20 years, was carried out manually and allowed to identify and classify the application felds, the types of identifable failures and the approaches used for their determination, for the analysis of their risk of occurrence and for their eco-assessment. The diferent classifcations have also been intersected with each other and all the proposed approaches have been discussed in detail, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages in relation to eco-assessment. From the study emerged a growing and heterogeneous interest on the subject by the scientifc community, and a certain independence of the analysed methods with respect to traditional approaches of both failure risk analysis and eco-assessment. Great attention of the methods about product functioning has been highlighted, in addition to the use of tests, simulations, FMEA (failure mode and efect analysis)-based approaches and knowledge databases to determine the failures, while statistical methods are preferred to support risks analysis and LCA (life cycle assessment) for environmental impact calculation. If, in the coming years, this argument also spreads in industry, the results provided by this review could be exploited as a frst framework for practitioners.