Life Cycle Inventory: An In-Depth Look at the Modeling, Data, and Available Tools

Abstract

Producing a product, providing a service, or making a decision that affects the way products are produced or consumed has repercussions on an intricate and wide range of activities. Life cycle assessment (LCA) aims to give a measure of the environmental potential impacts associated with a given product, service, or decision by accounting for the impacts of these webs of activities. This article describes the process of creating a model of the web of activities that allows determining its potential environmental impacts. This model consists of unit processes representing a specific activity and that are linked together through intermediate flows describing products’ exchanges between the unit processes. The result of these linked unit processes consists of the product system. Unit processes in the product system exchanges flows with the nature that are named elementary flows. Because modeling each single unit process and its associated flows each time an LCA is performed will be time and data consuming, the LCA community developed life cycle inventory (LCI) databases and LCA tools. LCI databases store unit processes, their exchanges, the quantification of these exchanges and the way unit processes are linked. LCA tools are softwares that allow modeling the whole LCA: from the product system modeling to the potential environmental impacts calculation. Main characteristics of LCI databases and LCA tools as well as some examples are provided in this article.