Prospective environmental assessment of emerging technology is necessary in order to inform designers of beneficial changes early in a technology's development, and policy makers looking to fund projects and nudge manufacturers toward the most sustainable application of a technology. Existing analyses often have shortcomings such as failing to consider the environmental impacts in all stages of a product's life cycle; implicitly assuming that the emerging technology will be cost‐effective wherever it is technically viable; and assuming optimistic application scenarios that discontinue long‐established trends in human behavior. In this article, we propose a new approach, complementary to the prospective and anticipatory life cycle assessment literature, addressing the above concerns and attempting to make sense of the large uncertainties inherent in such analyses by using distributions to model all the inputs. The paper focuses on emerging manufacturing technologies, such as incremental sheet forming (ISF), but the issues examined are also applicable to new end‐use products, such as autonomous vehicles. This paper makes use of approaches (such as Bass modeling and product cannibalization considerations) familiar to those in the business community who anticipate market diffusion of a new technology and the effect on existing technology sales. The proposed methodology is demonstrated by estimating the potential environmental impacts in the U.S. car industry by 2030 of an emerging double‐sided ISF process. Energy and cost models of ISF and drawing are used to estimate potential mean savings of around 100 TJ_primary and 60 million U.S. dollars per year by 2030.

中文翻译：

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新兴技术的前瞻性环境分析：一种批判性，一种拟议的方法论以及一个关于增量板材成形的案例研究

为了使设计人员在技术开发的早期阶段就有益的变化告知设计者，有必要对新兴技术进行前瞻性的环境评估，而决策者则希望为项目提供资金，并推动制造商朝着技术的最可持续发展方向发展。现有的分析通常有一些缺点，例如未能在产品生命周期的所有阶段考虑环境影响；隐含地假设新兴技术在技术上可行的地方将具有成本效益；并假设乐观的应用场景中断了人类行为的长期趋势。在本文中，我们提出了一种新方法，作为对预期和预期生命周期评估文献的补充，解决上述问题，并尝试通过使用分布对所有输入进行建模来理解此类分析中固有的巨大不确定性。本文着重于新兴制造技术，例如增量板材成形（ISF），但所研究的问题也适用于新的最终用途产品，例如自动驾驶汽车。本文利用了商业社区中熟悉的方法（例如Bass建模和产品同类化考虑），他们期望新技术在市场上的普及以及对现有技术销售的影响。通过估算到2030年新兴的双面ISF流程对美国汽车行业的潜在环境影响，证明了所提出的方法。_初级和每年60000000美元到2030年。