Environmental Precautionary Assessment in Research Projects: The Example of Photovoltaics

[Automatically extracted and translated] The project 'Environmental Precautionary Assessment in Research Projects', commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT) since early 1990, aims to develop an assessment procedure that ensures the effects on humans and the environment of a technical development intended by a research project are identified in a timely manner. Decision-makers should thus be enabled to decide at the earliest possible time before or after the awarding of research projects which of the various environmental aspects are to be considered relevant for the projects and should be formulated as goals or criteria as part of the projects. In the orientation phase of the developed multi-stage assessment procedure, the determination of the investigation framework takes place through the work steps of substance identification, assessment of environmental relevance, and analysis of material flows. In the implementation and evaluation phase, the environmental precautionary investigation is carried out internally based on a specified requirements specification or precedes or runs parallel to the project. In the post-control phase, the review of the target specifications takes place, whereby the latest findings from the environmental precautionary investigation and the project itself can flow back into the assessment process and, if necessary, trigger a renewed environmental precautionary assessment. This report describes the status of the work up to the end of July 1991. The current processing status includes the conceptual design of the environmental precautionary assessment and initial partial results for practical implementation using the example of photovoltaics based on silicon cells.