<p dir="ltr">The race to comply with the Paris Climate Accords fueled by the desire to combat climate change and a greater appreciation of balance of ecological systems requires reducing reliance on fossil fuels and transitioning to using clean energy. This transition is expected to be cleaner but be also material intensive. These materials, such as neodymium or graphite, have been deemed critical by the United States, due to their importance to future of the country. Therefore, efforts are being made to diversify their production (by discovering new manufacturing methods) or improve the material efficiency of their applications.</p><p dir="ltr">It is important that these new applications are analyzed for their environmental impact. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is widely accepted methodology for conducting environmental assessment on products and processes. Traditional LCA has 4 steps – goal, scope definition, life cycle inventory, and life cycle impact analysis. Applying traditional LCA techniques on these emerging technologies has challenges, as they are still emerging and have demonstrated their potential at various scales – theoretical, lab scale, pilot scale, or small-scale industrial level. Often, the new processes or products are compared against existing conventional manufacturing methods. Therefore, to appropriately assess the impact of these new emerging technologies against current ones, the scope must be extended to include the product or manufacturing system (which is the economic system under which these technologies will operate and compete against). This methodology is applied to 3 technologies at various stages of their development.</p><p dir="ltr">In the first case study, for magnets, by including the importance of energy product to the product system within the LCA, we see that the higher energy product of additively manufactured magnets directly translates to its environmental benefits relative to injection molded magnets. The next case study looked at a novel process to create battery grade graphite, demonstrated at lab scale. This process was scaled to an industrial level and assessed against conventional methods of manufacturing graphite. The scaleup allowed the LCA to identify the molten salt and the graphite anode to be a potential hotspot. Lastly, the potential green marketability of aluminum cerium alloys is investigated. The product system is extended to include the effect of this new application on cerium compound prices and therefore the economic allocation for the LCA. A Nash equilibrium is found based on market dynamics for aluminum cerium alloys to help resolve this issue.</p><p dir="ltr">The case studies show that allowing the product systems to inform the LCA can result in richer results, which help identify hotspots or opportunities for these technologies as they mature and compete against the conventional products or processes.</p>