A survey of unresolved problems in life cycle assessment

Reap, John; Roman, Felipe; Duncan, Scott J.; Bras, Bert

doi:10.1007/s11367-008-0008-x

Cited by 807 publications

(303 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Emissions generated by a product's life cycle occur at many locations, enter multiple media (air, water, land), and cause impacts in relation to local environmental sensitivities (Owens 1997b;Reap et al 2003). Unlike global impacts such as stratospheric ozone depletion and global warming, those affecting local, regional and continental scales require spatial information in order to accurately associate sources with receiving environments of variable sensitivity.…”

Section: Spatial Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Estimates of water quantity impacts (i.e., drought stress on biomass, well failure, etc.) depend upon spatially explicit hydrology models or data sets (Heuvelmans et al 2005;Reap et al 2004). Groundwater contamination from landfills has been found to vary by as much as four orders of magnitude based on geological conditions and geographic location (Hellweg 2001).…”

Section: Spatial Variation and Transport Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

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A survey of unresolved problems in life cycle assessment

Reap,

Roman,

Duncan

et al. 2008

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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674

303

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Background, aims, and scope Life cycle assessment (LCA) stands as the pre-eminent tool for estimating environmental effects caused by products and processes from 'cradle to grave' or 'cradle to cradle.' It exists in multiple forms, claims a growing list of practitioners and remains a focus of continuing research. Despite its popularity and codification by organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, life cycle assessment is a tool in need of improvement. Multiple authors have written about its individual problems, but a unified treatment of the subject is lacking. The following literature survey gathers and explains issues, problems and problematic decisions currently limiting LCA's impact assessment and interpretation phases. Main features The review identifies 15 major problem areas and organizes them by the LCA phases in which each appears. This part of the review focuses on the latter eight problems. It is meant as a concise summary for practitioners interested in methodological limitations which might degrade the accuracy of their assessments. For new researchers, it provides an overview of pertinent problem areas toward which they might wish to direct their research efforts. Having identified and discussed LCA's major problems, closing sections highlight the most critical problems and briefly propose research agendas meant to improve them. Results and discussion Multiple problems occur in each of LCA's four phases and reduce the accuracy of this tool. Considering problem severity and the adequacy of current solutions, six of the 15 discussed problems are of paramount importance. In LCA's latter two phases, spatial variation and local environmental uniqueness are critical problems requiring particular attention. Data availability and quality are identified as critical problems affecting all four phases. Conclusions and recommendations Observing that significant efforts by multiple researchers have not resulted in a single, agreed upon approach for the first three critical problems, development of LCA archetypes for functional unit definition, boundary selection and allocation is proposed. Further development of spatially explicit, dynamic modeling is recommended to ameliorate the problems of spatial variation and local environmental uniqueness. Finally, this paper echoes calls for peer-reviewed, standardized LCA inventory and impact databases, and it suggests the development of model bases. Both of these efforts would help alleviate persistent problems with data availability and quality.

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Section: Spatial Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Spatial Variation and Transport Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

A survey of unresolved problems in life cycle assessment

Reap,

Roman,

Duncan

et al. 2008

Int J Life Cycle Assess

Self Cite

674

303

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Barley yield emerged as the main driver for the impacts, and future crop yields were estimated through interpolations from the dynamic FASSET crop model (Doltra et al, 2012). Since the lack of primary data is one of the most important drawbacks affecting the reliability of LCA studies (Reap et al, 2008), and http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2015.02.007 5 particularly agricultural LCAs (Notarnicola et al, 2012), the assessment of environmental impacts of future systems should rely on measured data from the system studied. This is rarely possible for future agricultural systems, but in our study crop yield and crop quality data from manipulated experiments, where plant material was screened in realistic future climate scenarios and exposed to realistic extreme events, have been the main input to the LCA.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eco-efficient production of spring barley in a changed climate: A Life Cycle Assessment including primary data from future climate scenarios

Niero

Ingvordsen

Peltonen‐Sainio

et al. 2015

Agricultural Systems

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The paper has two main objectives: (i) to assess the eco-efficiency of spring barley cultivation for malting in Denmark in a future changed climate (700 ppm [CO 2 ] and +5ºC) through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and (ii) to compare alternative future cultivation scenarios, both excluding and including earlier sowing and cultivar selection as measures of adaptation to a changed climate. A baseline scenario describing the current spring barley cultivation in Denmark was defined, and the expected main deviations were identified (differences in pesticide treatment index, modifications in nitrate leaching and change in crop yield). The main input data originate from experiments, where spring barley cultivars were cultivated in a climate phytotron under controlled and manipulated treatments. Effects of changed climate on both crop productivity and crop quality were represented, as well as impacts of predicted extreme events, simulated through a long heat-wave. LCA results showed that the changed climatic conditions will likely increase the negative impacts on the environment from Danish spring barley cultivation, since all environmental impact categories experienced increased impact for all investigated scenarios, except under the very optimistic assumption that the pace of yield improvement by breeding in the future will be the same as it was in the last decades. The main driver of the increased environmental impact was identified as the reduction in crop yield. Therefore, potential adaptation strategies should mainly focus on maintaining or improving crop productivity. The LCA also showed that selection of proper cultivars for future climate conditions including the challenge from extreme events is one of the most effective ways to reduce future environmental impacts of spring barley. Finally, if yield measurements are based on relative protein content, the negative effects of the future climate seem to be reduced.

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“…A useful heuristic is to "exclude from the system all activities that have negligible effects on the results" [59], though this perspective somewhat begs the question; how do we know which activities will have negligible results without having first analyzed them? The issue of where to draw our boundary is known within the LCA literature as the cutoff or truncation problem [60,61].…”

Section: Truncation ("Cutoff") Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Apples to Apples: Why the Net Energy Analysis Community Needs to Adopt the Life-Cycle Analysis Framework

2016

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How do we know which energy technologies or resources are worth pursuing and which aren't? One way to answer that question is to compare the energy return of a certain technology-i.e., how much energy is remaining after accounting for the amount of energy expended in the production and delivery process. Such energy return ratios (the most famous of which is energy return on investment (EROI)) fall within the field of net energy analysis (NEA), and provide an easy way to determine which technology is "better"; i.e., higher Energy Return Ratios (ERRs) are, certeris paribus, better than lower ERRs. Although useful as a broad measure of energy profitability, comparisons can also be misleading, particularly if the units being compared are different. For example, the energy content of electricity produced from a photovoltaic cell is different than the energy content of coal at the mine-mouth, yet these are often compared directly within the literature. These types of inconsistencies are common within the NEA literature. In this paper, we offer life cycle assessment (LCA) and the LCA methodology as a possible solution to the persistent methodological issues within the NEA community, and urge all NEA practitioners to adopt this methodology in the future.

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A survey of unresolved problems in life cycle assessment

Abstract: Background

Cited by 807 publications

References 48 publications

A survey of unresolved problems in life cycle assessment

A survey of unresolved problems in life cycle assessment

Eco-efficient production of spring barley in a changed climate: A Life Cycle Assessment including primary data from future climate scenarios

Comparing Apples to Apples: Why the Net Energy Analysis Community Needs to Adopt the Life-Cycle Analysis Framework

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