Synonym

Life Cycle Analysis

Related expressions

Life Cycle Inventory, environmental performance , Key Performance Indicator.

Explanation

A life cycle assessment, also known as life cycle analysis, is the assessment of the environmental impact of a given product or service throughout the analysed lifespan.

The goal of LCA is to identify the significant, to improve and compare the environmental performance of products and services. This implies that LCA can be used to choose the least burdensome one for the environment. The term 'life cycle' refers to the notion that a fair, holistic assessment for a product or a service requires the assessment of raw material production, manufacture, distribution, use and disposal including all intervening transportation steps. This is the life cycle of the product. The concept also can be used to optimize the environmental performance of a single product (ecodesign) or to optimize the environmental performance of a company. For products, the pollution caused by usage is also part of the analysis.
Common categories of assessed damages are global warming (from greenhouse gases), acidification, eutrophication as well as depletion of minerals and fossil fuels.

The procedures of life cycle assessment (LCA) are part of the ISO 14000 environmental management standards.
Cradle-to-gate is the LCA of the efficiency of a product or service until it is produced or delivered. It is often used for Environmental Product Declarations (EPD). However, today it has become more important to include a full life cycle in the EPD, especially to cope with a climate declaration.

The Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) is an integral part of an LCA, involving the compilation and quantification of inputs and outputs, for a given product system throughout its life cycle. The life cycle inventory is a process whereby the energy and material flows within the system boundaries are identified based on the LCI methodology applied. This provides an overview of the environmental stressors of the product and attempts to include all components of the life cycle, from material extraction through to production and finally recycling or waste disposal.

Application/usage in Indisputable KEY

The project will make use of both cradle-to-gate LCA and full LCA in order to quantify the environmental performance and some of the environmental KPIs of different entities in the wood supply chain.
All steps in the supply chain will be thoroughly analysed to identify environmental impact caused by emissions from the processes, by resources used and by generated waste. As wood products have a low ratios of value/volume and value/weight, and since they are heavy products that require speciality equipment for transportation, this activity will be considered specifically. Input from companies in all part of the value chain will be necessary.
Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) will be constructed for some selected products of the case studies in Indisputable KEY.

Institutions with teaching capabilities

In Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the Life Cycle Assessment Laboratory is a research and teaching unit serving NTNU with expertise on LCA and related tools like Material flow analysis (MFA) and Substance flow analysis (SFA). This lab provides practical training sessions in the use of LCA software tools.

University of Nancy (France) proposed a 2-day training about LCA of industrial products.

There are several institutions specialised in LCA all around the world, which proposed training courses:

American Center for Life Cycle Assessment
Australian Center for Design
PRé Consultants in Holland , etc.

Available text books and training material

Several books and publications exist on LCA subject. Among them,

“ Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Goods and Services - An Input-Output Approach ”, Chris T. Hendrickson, Lester B. Lave, H. Scott Matthews, 2006.

“ Handbook on Life Cycle Assessment: Operational Guide to the ISO Standards ” Jeroen B. Guinée, 2002: the general aim of this Handbook on LCA is to provide a stepwise `cookbook' with operational guidelines for conducting an LCA study step-by-step, justified by a scientific background document, based on the ISO Standards for LCA.

“ Wood in Our Future: The Role of Life-Cycle Analysis ” (proceedings of a Symposium, 1997): to better assess the use of wood as a raw material, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service asked the National Research Council's Board on Agriculture to bring together experts to review the analytical techniques used to follow the life-cycle of wood production -from tree to product- and assess the environmental impacts. This resulting book provides a base of current knowledge, identifying what data are lacking, where future efforts should be focused, and what is known about the methodologies used to assess environmental impacts. The book also focuses on national and international efforts to develop integrated environmental, economic, and energy accounting methologies.