Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

This chapter covers principles and metrics used in life cycle inventory/assessment, including the most recent trends in business and academia as well as discussions related to life cycle management, trade‐off management, and the debate around using a single metric versus a multivariate approach.

Sustainability strategy and blockchain-enabled life cycle assessment: a focus on materials industry

“…LCA is a methodology that allows a company to estimate the cumulative environmental and social impacts associated with manufacturing a product or delivering a service, thereby providing a comprehensive view of the potential trade-off in environmental and social impacts associated with a given activity (Gonzales 2018;Linkov et al 2017). LCA examines the impacts of a product on the environment by accounting for all processes starting from converting inputs to outputs throughout the product's life cycle.…”

“…LCA examines the impacts of a product on the environment by accounting for all processes starting from converting inputs to outputs throughout the product's life cycle. Different stages of the product life cycle include: its birth, design, raw material extraction, material production, through to its use and final disposal (Gonzales 2018).…”

“…Further, it can be even more expensive when data are not readily available or if one's knowledge of the system under study is limited. Consequently, this will not only increase costs when large amount of data is required (van der Meer 2018) but also increase the uncertainty associated with data availability when one must either make some assumptions about the data source or to utilize averaged data (Gonzales 2018). When LCA studies depend on assumptions and scenarios to assess real-world problems in a simplified model, it can create scepticism about LCA results (van der Meer 2018).…”

“…Due to inherent limitations in LCA, transparency about the assumptions and data quality for data used in the assessments is questionable (Gonzales 2018), especially, data gathering in social LCA (Norris 2014). On one hand, to gather all the necessary data to carry out the assessment is a challenging task and can be prohibitively expensive and often secondary data cannot cover the lack of information about all the processes under study (Fauzi et al 2019).…”

“…Since LCA is an iterative methodology, data transparency is required to greatly help bolster the credibility of the assessments and make it easier to constantly integrate up-todate data in providing accurate and reliable information to support decision-making (Björklund 2002;Gonzales 2018). LCA requires validation to ensure credibility of information reported and exchanged.…”