Life‐Cycle Assessment in Relation to Risk Assessment: An Evolving Perspective

Abstract

A life‐cycle approach takes a cradle‐to‐grave perspective of a product's numerous activities from the raw material extraction to final disposal. There have been recent efforts to develop life‐cycle assessment (LCA) to assess both environmental and human health issues. The question then arises: what are the capabilities of LCA, especially in relation to risk assessment? To address this question, this paper first describes the LCA mass‐based accounting system and then analyzes the use of this approach for environmental and human health assessment. The key LCA limitations in this respect are loss of spatial, temporal, dose‐response, and threshold information. These limitations affect LCA's capability to assess several environmental issues, and human health in particular. This leads to the conclusion that LCA impact assessment does not predict or measure actual effects, quantitate risks, or address safety. Instead, LCA uses mass loadings with simplifying assumptions and subjective judgments to add independent effects and exposures into an overall score. As a result, LCA identifies possible human health issues on a systemwide basis from a worst case, hypothetical hazard perspective. Ideally, the identified issues would then be addressed by more detailed assessment methods, such as risk assessment.