The lack of publicly available life cycle assessments (LCA) of CNC from large-scale producers mainly stems from confidentiality of process information and competitiveness for developing CNC markets . To date, only a handful of research papers have been published addressing the environmental impacts of CNC production with reference only to lab and pilot-scale processes. However, these studies provide little guidance on the impact of large-scale CNC production as they do not consider variations in feedstocks, process designs, production scale and geographical locations. These variations can potentially have significant influence on calculated environmental impacts. Scale-up effects of small-scale processes are also largely uncertain, which limits the relevance of published LCA results for the users of commercially produced CNCs.