Who Cares About Life Cycle Assessment?

The body of life cycle assessment (LCA) literature is vast and has grown over the last decade at a dauntingly rapid rate. Many LCAs have been published on the same or very similar technologies or products, in some cases leading to hundreds of publications. One result is the impression among decision makers that LCAs are inconclusive, owing to perceived and real variability in published estimates of life cycle impacts. Despite the extensive available literature and policy need formore conclusive assessments, only modest attempts have been made to synthesize previous research. A significant challenge to doing so are differences in characteristics of the considered technologies and inconsistencies in methodological choices (e.g., system boundaries, coproduct allocation, and impact assessment methods) among the studies that hamper easy comparisons and related decision support. An emerging trend is meta-analysis of a set of results from LCAs, which has the potential to clarify the impacts of a particular technology, process, product, or material and produce more robust and policy-relevant results. Meta-analysis in this context is defined here as an analysis of a set of published LCA results to estimate a single or multiple impacts for a single technology or a technology category, either in a statisticalmore » sense (e.g., following the practice in the biomedical sciences) or by quantitative adjustment of the underlying studies to make them more methodologically consistent. One example of the latter approach was published in Science by Farrell and colleagues (2006) clarifying the net energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of ethanol, in which adjustments included the addition of coproduct credit, the addition and subtraction of processes within the system boundary, and a reconciliation of differences in the definition of net energy metrics. Such adjustments therefore provide an even playing field on which all studies can be considered and at the same time specify the conditions of the playing field itself. Understanding the conditions under which a meta-analysis was conducted is important for proper interpretation of both the magnitude and variability in results. This special supplemental issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology includes 12 high-quality metaanalyses and critical reviews of LCAs that advance understanding of the life cycle environmental impacts of different technologies, processes, products, and materials. Also published are three contributions on methodology and related discussions of the role of meta-analysis in LCA. The goal of this special supplemental issue is to contribute to the state of the science in LCA beyond the core practice of producing independent studies on specific products or technologies by highlighting the ability of meta-analysis of LCAs to advance understanding in areas of extensive existing literature. The inspiration for the issue came from a series of meta-analyses of life cycle GHG emissions from electricity generation technologies based on research from the LCA Harmonization Project of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, which also provided financial support for this special supplemental issue. (See the editorial from this special supplemental issue [Lifset 2012], which introduces this supplemental issue and discusses the origins, funding, peer review, and other aspects.) The first article on reporting considerations for meta-analyses/critical reviews for LCA is from Heath and Mann (2012), who describe the methods used and experience gained in NREL's LCA Harmonization Project, which produced six of the studies in this special supplemental issue. Their harmonization approach adapts key features of systematic review to identify and screen published LCAs followed by a meta-analytical procedure to adjust published estimates to ones based on a consistent set of methods and assumptions to allow interstudy comparisons and conclusions to be made. In a second study on methods, Zumsteg and colleagues (2012) propose a checklist for a standardized technique to assist in conducting and reporting systematic reviews of LCAs, including meta-analysis, that is based on a framework used in evidence-based medicine. Widespread use of such a checklist would facilitate planning successful reviews, improve the ability to identify systematic reviews in literature searches, ease the ability to update content in future reviews, and allow more transparency of methods to ease peer review and more appropriately generalize findings. Finally, Zamagni and colleagues (2012) propose an approach, inspired by a meta-analysis, for categorizing main methodological topics, reconciling diverging methodological developments, and identifying future research directions in LCA. Their procedure involves the carrying out of a literature review on articles selected according to predefined criteria.« less

Purpose The ISO 14044 standard for life cycle assessment (LCA) provides the reference decision hierarchy for dealing with multi-functional processes. We observe that, in practice, the consistent implementation of this hierarchy by LCA practitioners and LCA guidance document developers may be limited. In an attempt to explain this observation, and to offer suggestions as to how consistency in LCA practice might be improved, we identify and compare the rationales for (and limitations of) different common approaches to solving multi-functionality problems in LCA. Methods The different prevalent understandings of specific approaches for dealing with multi-functional processes were identified, and their respective rationales were analyzed. This takes into account identifying the implicit underlying assumptions regarding the nature and purpose of LCA that support each approach. Results and discussion We identified what we believe to be three internally consistent but mutually exclusive schools of thought amongst LCA practitioners, which differ in subtle but important ways in terms of their understanding of the nature and purpose of LCA, and the multi-functionality solutions necessary to support them. These three divisions follow two demarcations. The first is between consequential and attributional data modeling approaches. The second is between adherence to a natural science-based approach (privileging physical allocation solutions) and a socioeconomic approach (favoring economic allocation solutions) in attributional data modeling. Conclusions We conclude that the ISO 14044 multi-functionality hierarchy should explicitly differentiate between attributional and consequential data modeling applications. We question the feasibility and practical utility of system expansion (currently privileged in the ISO hierarchy) in attributional data modeling applications. We suggest that ISO 14044 should also make explicit its rationale for privileging natural science-based approaches to solving multi-functionality problems and to more clearly differentiate between natural science and social science-based approaches. We also call for the formulation of additional guidance for solving multi-functionality problems, in particular for justifying the use of lower-tier solutions from the ISO hierarchy when these are applied in LCA studies. We suggest that this additional guidance and clarity in ISO 14044 will contribute to increased consistency in LCA practice and also increase the potential for users of information from LCA studies to make informed decisions as to their relevance within the context of specific intended applications.

The Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society (ALCAS) is a professional organisation for people interested in practice, use, development and interpretation of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It is a not-for-profit organisation with individual and corporate members from industry, government, academia and service organisation. The purpose of the society is to promote and foster the responsible development and application of LCA methodology in Australia and internationally with a view to making a positive contribution to Ecological Sustainable Development (ESD) "and to represent the Australian LCA community in the international arena. The specific objectives of ALCAS are: 1. To promote and foster the appropriate application of LCA in Australia. 2. To promote and foster the responsible development of LCA methodology in Australia with consideration of international initiatives and commensurate with local conditions. 3. To foster links with the international LCA community. 4. To organise a regular LCA Roundtable to facilitate information exchange and discussion on LCA amongst stakeholder groups. 5. To contribute to national policies, positions and approaches on LCA and its applications both nationally and internationally. 6. Increase education and awareness of LCA among stakeholders including industry, academia, government, non-government organisations, LCA practitioners, end users and the general public. 7. To develop a national competence in LCA to meet the environmental challenges both locally and internationally.

The mere existence of life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology and general acceptance of the life cycle philosophy is not enough to make their use widespread in industry. To gain a better understanding of factors shaping LCA studies and life cycle related practice, field studies of the development of LCA practice in two companies were carried out. In order to obtain a deeper understanding of LCA practice, the number of ‘variables’ was minimized and two similar companies were chosen for study: Stora Enso and SCA. Both companies are part of the Swedish forest products industry, are large multinational enterprises and have been working with LCA since the early 1990s. Both interviews and document studies were used to collect data regarding LCA work from its introduction until 2003. We found fundamental differences in LCA practice between two similar companies in regard to LCA studies per se (the number of studies undertaken and methodological preferences) and also in regard to the organisation of and approach to LCA work. By testing various theoretical explanations of these divergent LCA practices, we identified the actions of individuals and their understanding of the situation as important factors shaping LCA practice. Although sector-wide recommendations on LCA practice are common in the LCA community, this study indicates that companies use LCA differently despite similar structural conditions such as company size or sector affiliation. Since the understanding and actions of individuals are important in shaping LCA practice, people working with LCA in industry probably have greater scope for action than they recognise and than sector recommendations may imply when it comes to organising and carrying out their work. Thus, those working with life cycle issues, even in different sectors, can learn much from each other about ways of organising and benefiting from LCA work.

This chapter discusses strengths and limitations of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) not by linear analysis but by elucidating limitations embedded in strengths. It elaborates perceived and real limitations in LCA methodology grouped by research need, inherent characteristic or modeling choice. So, LCA practice continues to suffer from variations in practice that can result in different LCA results. Some limitations, such as modeling missing impact indicators and making life cycle inventory more readily-available, will be addressed through continued research and development of the tool. Other modeling choice-related limitations, such as matching goal to approach setting a proper functional unit or appropriately scoping the assessment, need to be addressed through continued education and training to assist users in the proper application of the tool. Still other limitations in LCA practice would benefit by the development of harmonized guidance and global agreement by LCA practitioners and modelers.

Despite the ever-growing body of life cycle assessment (LCA) literature on electricity generation technologies, inconsistent methods and assumptions hamper comparison across studies and pooling of published results. Synthesis of the body of previous research is necessary to generate robust results to assess and compare environmental performance of different energy technologies for the benefit of policy makers, managers, investors, and citizens. With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory initiated the LCA Harmonization Project in an effort to rigorously leverage the numerous individual studies to develop collective insights. The goals of this project were to: (1) understand the range of published results of LCAs of electricity generation technologies, (2) reduce the variability in published results that stem from inconsistent methods and assumptions, and (3) clarify the central tendency of published estimates to make the collective results of LCAs available to decision makers in the near term. The LCA Harmonization Project's initial focus was evaluating life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from electricity generation technologies. Six articles from this first phase of the project are presented in a special supplemental issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology on Meta-Analysis of LCA: coal (Whitaker et al. 2012), concentratingmore » solar power (Burkhardt et al. 2012), crystalline silicon photovoltaics (PVs) (Hsu et al. 2012), thin-film PVs (Kim et al. 2012), nuclear (Warner and Heath 2012), and wind (Dolan and Heath 2012). Harmonization is a meta-analytical approach that addresses inconsistency in methods and assumptions of previously published life cycle impact estimates. It has been applied in a rigorous manner to estimates of life cycle GHG emissions from many categories of electricity generation technologies in articles that appear in this special supplemental supplemental issue, reducing the variability and clarifying the central tendency of those estimates in ways useful for decision makers and analysts. Each article took a slightly different approach, demonstrating the flexibility of the harmonization approach. Each article also discusses limitations of the current research, and the state of knowledge and of harmonization, pointing toward a path of extending and improving the meta-analysis of LCAs.« less

The main goal of this study is to undertake the three methods of life cycle assessment (LCA), the environmental performance (EP), and the building information modeling (BIM) to determine the environmental performance and impacts of two window frame materials: aluminum and wood. This study has been carried out in a proposed project at the Assiut University campus. The LCA has been conducted by assessing materials and processes involved in manufacturing the two window frame types using the SimaPro. The LCA scope of this research covers from cradle to the gate with a designated system boundary. The network flow has been drawn to produce one kilogram of aluminum and wood; the quantities data were gathered from the BIM (using Autodesk Revit). Selecting the database is carefully picked from the Ecoinvent dataset to be closer to Egypt's manufacturing processes. Afterwards, the IMPACT 2002+ with midpoint and endpoint calculations has been used. Finally, the LCA results have been compared with the EP results (using DesignBuilder) to determine the best choice between the two materials. The integration analysis shows that the aluminum industry has higher negative environmental impacts and environmental performance than the wood industry. The total midpoint results of the two materials are found to be 29.6 for aluminum, and 7.57 the wood. Turning to the endpoint results, human health and resource depletion impacts are the most significant results. The human health scored the highest value, with 13.9 for aluminum and 3.51 for wood. A novel framework for integrating LCA, BIM, and EP for a proposed building during the early phases of a project has been conducted in this study. The presented study can be used as a model for integrating comparative analysis on other proposed projects as the LCA applications in Egypt are scarce due to the absence of a reliable database. This study has introduced a value applying an approach to select the appropriate life cycle inventory database from the Ecoinvent dataset. The research findings contribute to choosing the most suitable window frame materials with the most energy-efficient effect and the least environmental burden. Moreover, it can help the concerned legislative bodies and the decision-makers.

Residual biomass as resource – Life-cycle environmental impact of wastes in circular resource systems

Environmental assessment at the urban level combining LCA-GIS methodologies: A case study of energy retrofits in the Barcelona metropolitan area

Environmental impact assessment and remediation decision-making of a contaminated megasite: Combining LCA and IO-LCA

Assessing burden of disease as disability adjusted life years in life cycle assessment

As the sustainability improvement becomes an essential business task of industry, a number of companies are adopting IT-based environmental information systems (EIS). Life cycle assessment (LCA), a tool to improve environmental friendliness of a product, can also be systemized as a part of the EIS. This paper presents a case of an environmental information system which is integrated with online LCA tool to produce sets of hybrid life cycle inventory and examine its usefulness in the field application of the environmental management. Samsung SDI Ltd., the producer of display panels, has launched an EIS called Sustainability Management Initiative System (SMIS). The system comprised modules of functions such as environmental management system (EMS), green procurement (GP), customer relation (e-VOC), eco-design, and LCA. The LCA module adopted the hybrid LCA methodology in the sense that it combines process LCA for the site processes and input–output (IO) LCA for upstream processes to produce cradle-to-gate LCA results. LCA results from the module are compared with results of other LCA studies made by the application of different methodologies. The advantages and application of the LCA system are also discussed in light of the electronics industry. LCA can play a vital role in sustainability management by finding environmental burden of products in their life cycle. It is especially true in the case of the electronics industry, since the electronic products have some critical public concerns in the use and end-of-life phase. SMIS shows a method for hybrid LCA through online data communication with EMS and GP module. The integration of IT-based hybrid LCA in environmental information system was set to begin in January 2006. The advantage of the comparing and regular monitoring of the LCA value is that it improves the system completeness and increases the reliability of LCA. By comparing the hybrid LCA and process LCA in the cradle-to-gate stage, the gap between both methods of the 42-in. standard definition plasma display panel (PDP) ranges from 1% (acidification impact category) to −282% (abiotic resource depletion impact category), with an average gap of 68.63%. The gaps of the impact categories of acidification (AP), eutrophication (EP), and global warming (GWP) are relatively low (less than 10%). In the result of the comparative analysis, the strength of correlation of three impact categories (AP, EP, GWP) shows that it is reliable to use the hybrid LCA when assessing the environmental impacts of the PDP module. Hybrid LCA has its own risk on data accuracy. However, the risk is affordable when it comes to the comparative LCA among different models of similar product line of a company. In the results of 2 years of monitoring of 42-in. Standard definition PDP, the hybrid LCA score has been decreased by 30%. The system also efficiently shortens man-days for LCA study per product. This fact can facilitate the eco-design of the products and can give quick response to the customer's inquiry on the product's eco-profile. Even though there is the necessity for improvement of process data currently available, the hybrid LCA provides insight into the assessments of the eco-efficiency of the manufacturing process and the environmental impacts of a product. As the environmental concerns of the industries increase, the need for environmental data management also increases. LCA shall be a core part of the environmental information system by which the environmental performances of products can be controlled. Hybrid type of LCA is effective in controlling the usual eco-profile of the products in a company. For an industry, in particular electronics, which imports a broad band of raw material and parts, hybrid LCA is more practicable than the classic LCA. Continuous efforts are needed to align input data and keep conformity, which reduces data uncertainty of the system.

Territorial Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): What exactly is it about? A proposal towards using a common terminology and a research agenda

Reusing exterior wall framing systems: A cradle-to-cradle comparative life cycle assessment

Chapter 11 - Life cycle assessment of e-waste management: current practices and future research agenda towards sustainability