IMPACT World+: a globally regionalized life cycle impact assessment method

Cécile Bulle,Viêt Cao,Alexis Laurent,Annie Levasseur,Sébastien Humbert ,Anne‐Marie Boulay ,Andrew Henderson,Gladys Liard,Guillaume Bourgault,Michael Zwicky Hauschild ,Vincent De Bruille,Ralph K Rosenbaum,Shanna Shaked,Sormeh Kashef-Haghighi,Anna Kounina,Laure Patouillard,Manuele Margni,Pierre-Olivier Roy,Peter Fantke,Olivier Jolliet

doi:10.1007/s11367-019-01583-0

Abstract

IMPACT World+: a globally regionalized life cycle impact assessment method

Highlights

This paper addresses the need for a regionalized life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method covering the entire world, including addressing uncertainty related to spatial variability and implementing state-of-the-art characterization modeling approaches.The life cycle of a product implies numerous substance emission and resource use, which LCIA methods allow translating into a limited number of environmental impact scores by the mean of characterization factors, which indicate the environmental impact per unit of emission or resource use
With ReCiPe and IMPACT 2002+, IMPACT World+ finds that (a) climate change and impacts of particulate matter formation have a dominant contribution to global human health impacts whereas ionizing radiation, ozone layer depletion, and photochemical oxidant formation have a low contribution and (b) climate change and land use have a dominant contribution to global ecosystem quality impact. (c) New impact indicators introduced in IMPACT World+ and not considered in ReCiPe or IMPACT 2002+, in particular water consumption impacts on human health and the long-term impacts of marine acidification on ecosystem quality, are significant contributors to the overall global potential damage
IMPACT World+ enables the practitioner to parsimoniously account for spatial variability and to identify the elementary flows to be regionalized in priority to increase the discriminating power of life cycle assessment (LCA)

Summary

Introduction

This paper addresses the need for a regionalized life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method covering the entire world, including addressing uncertainty related to spatial variability and implementing state-of-the-art characterization modeling approaches.The life cycle of a product implies numerous substance emission and resource use, which LCIA methods allow translating into a limited number of environmental impact scores by the mean of characterization factors, which indicate the environmental impact per unit of emission or resource use. Developments are typically viewed along three families: midpoint (Bare 2011; Guinée et al 2002; Hauschild and Wenzel 1998) or damage (Goedkoop and Spriensma 2000; Steen 1999) oriented methods, and methods that attempted to combine both in a common and consistent framework (Goedkoop et al 2009; Itsubo and Inaba 2012; Jolliet et al 2003) These latter approaches allow LCA practitioners to calculate environmental profiles either at the midpoint or damage levels (depending on the scope of the LCA study) taking advantage of their respective merits in terms of lower model uncertainty and higher environmental relevance, respectively. The LCIA method presented here provides characterization results at midpoint and damage levels

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion