Environmental Input-Output Analysis and Hybrid Approaches to Improve the Set up of the Pasta Life Cycle Inventory

Abstract

Input-Output analysis has been recently proposed as a method to account for environmental burdens associated with a product life cycle (IO-LCA). This top-down technique refers to economic IO tables by taking the entire economy as system boundaries, without needing the use of cut-off criteria as necessarily done in the LCA studies. Although the completeness of the results obtained with IO-LCA, the use of monetary flows leads to several limitations due especially to the degree of aggregation of statistical data. Because of these shortcomings, in this paper the LCA and the IO-LCA will be applied to the same case study - pasta life cycle - in order to verify if the adoption of both could improve the quality of the inventory set up. The LCA has been conducted by following the ISO 14040 rules, while the IO-LCA by following two different methodologies: the Environmental Input Output Life Cycle Assessment, EIOLCA, and the Missing Inventory Estimation Tool, MIET, as stated by the relative softwares available on the web. Moreover, some hybrid methods partially contemplated by the literature have been applied. The paper shows that the I-O approach could permit to overcome some limitations, which are typical of the LCA, but, at the same time, could lead to other problems. The adoption of the hybrid methods could help to overcome the limitations of both the approaches (physical and monetary) but, before applying them, a good knowledge of their pro and cons is required in order to choose the typologies of material flows which have to be modelled by one or by the other approach.