Abstract
Environmental implications of the whole supply-chain of products, both goods and services, their use, and waste management, i.e., their entire life cycle from “cradle to grave” have to be considered to achieve more sustainable production and consumption patterns. Progress toward environmental sustainability requires enhancing the methodologies for quantitative, integrated environmental assessment and promoting the use of these methodologies in different domains. In the context of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of products, in recent years, several methodologies have been developed for Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA). The Joint Research Center of the European Commission (EC-JRC) led a “science to decision support” process which resulted in the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook, providing guidelines to the decision and application of methods for LCIA. The Handbook is the result of a comprehensive process of evaluation and selection of existing methods based on a set of scientific and stakeholder acceptance criteria and involving review and consultation by experts, advisory groups and the public. In this study, we report the main features of the ILCD LCIA recommendation development highlighting relevant issues emerged from this “from science to decision support” process in terms of research needs and challenges for LCIA. Comprehensiveness of the assessment, as well as acceptability and applicability of the scientific developments by the stakeholders, are key elements for the design of new methods and to guarantee the mainstreaming of the sustainability concept.
Highlights
Environmental implications of the whole supply-chain of products, both goods and services, their use, and waste management, i.e., their entire life cycle from “cradle to grave” have to be considered to achieve more sustainable production and consumption patterns
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is successfully used in the private sector, e.g., for: continuous environmental improvement of products; internal strategic decision support; evaluating risks and opportunities along the supply chain; communication on strategic aspects with stakeholders at company and association level and communication with customers on products, e.g., via Environmental Product Declarations (EPD), carbon labels and footprints
As one foreseen contribution those data sets contained in the European Reference Life Cycle Database (ELCD) that fulfill at least the entry level requirements of the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) are intended to be made available via the ILCD Data Network, covering core LCI data relevant to the European market
Summary
Environmental implications of the whole supply-chain of products, both goods and services, their use, and waste management, i.e., their entire life cycle from “cradle to grave” have to be considered to achieve more sustainable production and consumption patterns. The Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) Action Plan [10] confirmed that “(...) consistent and reliable data and methods are required to assess the overall environmental performance of products (...)” In this context, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (EC-JRC) led a “science-to-policy” process: gathering, capitalizing and evaluating existing knowledge in order to provide robust support to policy decision making. The guidelines for LCIA represent the result of a comprehensive process of evaluation and selection of methods based on a set of scientific and stakeholder acceptance criteria and involve extensive consultations with domain experts, advisory groups and the public, during a public consultation In this process a number of research needs, critical issues and challenges for Life Cycle. The document is organized as follows: in Section 2, the overall context of the development of the ILCD Handbook entailing the European Platform on LCA and the ILCD data network; in Section 3, the peculiarity of the LCIA recommended methods choice and the contribution of stakeholders; in Section 4, we discuss the research needs and the challenged emerged from the process and useful as starting point for future developments
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