Abstract
Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is a lively field of research, and data and models are continuously improved in terms of impact pathways covered, reliability, and spatial detail. However, many of these advancements are scattered throughout the scientific literature, making it difficult for practitioners to apply the new models. Here, we present the LC-IMPACT method that provides characterization factors at the damage level for 11 impact categories related to three areas of protection (human health, ecosystem quality, natural resources). Human health damage is quantified as disability adjusted life years, damage to ecosystem quality as global species extinction equivalents (based on potentially disappeared fraction of species), and damage to mineral resources as kilogram of extra ore extracted. Seven of the impact categories include spatial differentiation at various levels of spatial scale. The influence of value choices related to the time horizon and the level of scientific evidence of the impacts considered is quantified with four distinct sets of characterization factors. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method with an illustrative life cycle assessment example of different fuel options in Europe (petrol or biofuel). Differences between generic and regionalized impacts vary up to two orders of magnitude for some of the selected impact categories, highlighting the importance of spatial detail in LCIA. This article met the requirements for a gold – gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.
Highlights
Life cycle assessment (LCA) aims at quantifying potential environmental impacts associated with the life cycle of a product or service (Klöpffer, 1997)
The desire to assess the “complete” environmental impact profile has been an important driver for developments in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA)
There is still a need for a regionalized LCIA method that covers a large number of impact categories on a global level and respects the different scales that are relevant for the specific impact categories
Summary
Life cycle assessment (LCA) aims at quantifying potential environmental impacts associated with the life cycle of a product or service (Klöpffer, 1997). To increase the coverage of potential environmental impacts in LCIA, there is a need to increase the number of impact pathways considered by developing new methods or improving existing methods. This can be done, for example, by improving the modeling, using better data, or adding spatial detail for impacts that have a local or regional dimension (Pfister, Koehler, & Hellweg, 2009). Some of these newer, more environmentally relevant models, are less used compared to older and often less comprehensive models currently integrated in available methods It should be noted, that efforts on building new LCIA methods are ongoing (apart from LC-IMPACT: ReCiPe2016 (Huijbregts et al, 2017) and IMPACTWorld+ (Bulle et al, 2019)). We applied LC-IMPACT to a case study on different fuel options to illustrate its application
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