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What is LCA

Life Cycle Assessment

The essence of life cycle assessment is the examination, identification, and evaluation of the relevant environmental implications of a material, process, product, or system across its life span from creation to waste or , preferably, to re-creation in the same or another useful form. The society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry defines the LCA process as follow:

The life-cycle assessment is an objective process to evaluate the environmental burdens associated with a product, process, or activity by identifying and quantifying energy and material usage and environmental releases, to assess the impact of those energy and material uses and releases on the environment, and to evaluate and implement opportunities to effect environmental improvements. The assessment includes the entire life cycle manufacturing, transportation, and distribution; use/re-use/maintenance; recycling; and final disposal.

LCA involves making detailed measurements during the manufacture of the product, from the mining of the raw materials used in its production and distribution, through to its use, possible reuse or recycling, and its eventual disposal. The interactions of these stages with each other and with the external environment are shown in Figure 1. The combined stages constitute the entire cradle-to-grave system. LCA’s enable a manufacturer to quantify how much energy and raw materials are used, how much solid, liquid and gaseous waste is generated, at each stage of the product’s life. Such a study would normally ignore second generation impacts such as the energy required to fire bricks used to build the kilns used to manufacture the raw material.

A life cycle assessment is a large and complex effort, and there are many variations. Nonetheless, there is general agreement on the formal structure of LCA, which contains four stages: goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact analysis, and interpretation of results. The concept of the life cycle methodology is pictured in Figure 2.

The earliest forerunners of LCA were the Resource and Environmental Profile Analyses (REPAs) of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A series of studies were conducted by the Midwest Research Institute, and later by the consulting firm Franklin Associates Ltd., mostly for the private sector. One of the beverage companies was the firm for which REPA studies were done. The REPA study of different beverage packaging was a typical example of these LCA predecessors. As the term REPA suggests, these early studies emphasized raw material demands, energy inputs, and waste generation flows; attempts on more sophisticated analysis through environmental impact classifications would come later in the evolution of LCA methodology. In the late 1990s, LCA emerged as a worldwide environmental management tool in the form of the ISO 14040 series, it can be used to assess different technologies in order to identify the best environmental option; alternatively, and to provide a scientific basis for developing sound environmental strategies and policies in government or industry.

Reference

  • Raymond R. Tan, Environmental Life-Cycle Assessment: A Tool for Public and Corporate Policy Development, Engineering Department, De La Salle University – Manila, 2002
  • Thomas E. Graedel. Streamlined Life Cycle Assessment. Published by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1998.