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life cycle assessment
Originated in the late 1960’s, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method of comparing environmental impact for products,
technologies or services with an overview of their whole life cycle from cradle to grave. It serves to track the emissions of all
components which may impact the environment during product production, and considers their use and disposal. This includes
the processing of the raw materials, energy production and much more. LCAs work to an ISO standard 14040 and are completed
in four stages:
1. Goal & scope definition
A statement of the goal and scope of the assessment,
explains how and whom the results are to be communicated.
ISO require that the goal and scope of the LCA to be clearly
defined and consistent to the intended application.
Document to include technical details that guide the
following work –
• The function unit, which defines what precisely is being
studied and quantifies the service delivered by the
product system, it will provide references to the inputs
and outputs can be related
• System boundaries
• Assumptions and limitations
• Allocation methods used to partition the environmental
load of a process when several products or functions
share the same process; and
• The impact categories chosen
2. Life cycle inventory analysis (LCIA)
The process of creating an inventory of all the flows from
and to nature from a product or system. This data collection
should contain the following:
• The accounting of everything involved in the product or
service of interest
• Tracks all the incoming and outgoing flows of the
system, including inputs of raw materials, energy, water,
releases of air and land
• May involve hundreds of inventory flows, as well as
dozens of unit processes in a supply chain
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3. Life cycle impact assessment (LCI)
Following on from the analysis, the assessment stage
explores the significance of the LCI flow results and
categorises the data to facilitate evaluation. LCI assessment
includes
• selection of impact categories
• the assignation of inventory parameters to categories to
enable classification
• impact measurement, where LCI flows are converted
into common equivalence units which are then summed
to give an overall impact category total
4. Interpretation
This stage of the process serves to identify, quantify, check
and evaluate the results from the previous two stages. It will
give and indication to the accuracy and significance of the
study. The results are summarised and converted into a set
of conclusions and recommendations. The interpretation
should include:
• Identification of the issues highlighted by the results
from the LCIA and the LCI
• Evaluation of the LCA study, with emphasis on
completeness, sensitivity and consistency
• Conclusions, limitations and recommendations