Dr Eng. Valentina Russo, PhD
Valentina Russo is a System Engineer by education, specialised in Life Cycle Assessment and System Thinking. She holds a Senior Engineer position at Sustainability, Economics and Wastre Research Group (at CSIR) as well as she is registered engineer with the ECSA. Her areas of expertise are System Analysis and Modelling, and Environmental Sustainability and she has been working on multidisciplinary topics in those fields in the past 17 years, with a strong focus on Life Cycle Assessment related projects.
She has been working on a UNEP-funded project aimed at mainstreaming effective sustainable consumption and production policies, including circular economy models and she is currently busy conducting 2 projects focused on Building the foundations for product life cycle assessment in South Africa in accordance with EPR Regs and EU export market requirements.
Some relevant activities in the Life Cycle Thinking and System Modelling with a focus on materials value chain(s) are:
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) aimed at assessing the environmental impacts of plastic products (and of alternative materials) across the full product life cycle, to enable more informed choices;
- Life Cycle Sustainability aimed at broadening the scope of LCA to include social and economic aspects; enabling a broader, more holistic sustainability assessment of products;
- End-of-life modelling and material pollution indicators – improved country-specific modelling of the local waste management system, and indicators to account for material (including plastic) pollution.