LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT -ISO 14040 RC 14001- CODES PRODUCT STEWARDSHIP QUALITY

LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT -ISO 14040 RC 14001- CODES PRODUCT STEWARDSHIP QUALITY

A life-cycle assessment (LCA, also known as life-cycle analysis, ecobalance, and cradle-to-grave analysis) is a technique to assess environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product's life from-cradle-to-grave (i.e., from raw material extraction through materials processing, manufacture, distribution, use, repair and maintenance, and disposal or recycling). LCA’s can help avoid a narrow outlook on environmental concerns by:

• Compiling an inventory of relevant energy and material inputs and environmental releases;
• Evaluating the potential impacts associated with identified inputs and releases;
• Interpreting the results to help you make a more informed decision

Life Cycle Assessment (below LCA) is method of comparison of environmental impacts of products, technologies or services with a view to their whole life cycle, so called from cradle to grave. The emissions to all components of environment during product production, use and disposal are considered. Processes of raw material mining, material and energy production, additional processes or subprocesses are also involved.

LCA method has fixed structure and is practiced according to international standards ISO 14040. For the effective elaboration of LCA studies are used commercially available databases of processes and material and energy flows .
The LCA method is one of the most important information tools of environmentally oriented product policy. Within the meaning of EN ISO 14040 LCA method can be defined as compilation and evaluation of the inputs, outputs and the potential environmental impacts of a product system throughout its life cycle.

LCA method consists of 4 main phases:
1. goal and scope definition
2. inventory analysis
3. impact assessment
4. interpretation

Schema: Stages of an LCA according EN ISO 14040

EN ISO 14 040

Add 1: Goal and scope aims to definition how big part of product life cycle will be taken in assessment and to what will assessment be serving. The criteria serving to system comparison and specific time horizon are described in this step.

Add 2: The part of inventory analysis is description of material and energy flows within the product system and especially its interaction with environment, consumed raw materials and emissions to the environment. All important processes and subsidiary energy and material flows are described here.

Add 3: Details from inventory analysis serve for impact assessment. The indicator results of all impact categories are counted here; the importance of every impact category is assessed by normalization and eventually also by weighting. The result of impact assessment is table summary of all impacts.

Add 4: Interpretation of life cycle involve critical review, determination of data sensitivity and result presentation.


The LCA method can be applied in next applications:
- strategic planning and decision making,
- product development (ecodesign),
- alternative comparison for purpose of decision making in investment,
- ecolabelling,
- policy and regulations.

The utilization of LCA method can help to:
- searching the most available life cycles, e.g. those with minimal negative impact on environment,
- assuming the decisions in industry, public organizations or NGOs, which determinate direction and priorities in strategic planning, design or design product or process change,
- choice of important indicators of environmental behavior of organization including measurement and assessing techniques, mainly in connection with the assessment of state of its environmental improving,
- marketing with the link on formulation of environmental declaration or ecolabelling (in declaration accepted on the conference Eco-labelling for a Sustainable Future in Berlin 1998 was adopted the recommendation to use LCA method in ecolabelling programmes especially from the reason that by this is possible to discover the causes of negative impacts on environment and by their disposal is possible to increase the effectivity and preventive activity of ecolabelling programmes).

There are two basic types of LCA tools:

• dedicated software packages intended for practitioners; and
• tools with the LCA in the background intended for people who want LCA-based results without have to actually develop the LCA data and impact measures.

In the former category, the principal tools are GaBi Software, developed by PE International, SimaPro, developed by PRé Consultants, Quantis SUITE 2.0, developed by Quantis International and umberto, developed by ifu Hamburg GmbH, and web-based solutions include Earthster and LinkCycle. In the second category, different tools operate at different levels. At the product level, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) makes its BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability) tool freely available, Solidworks CAD software (Dassault Systèmes) presents LCA-based environmental information to the user through an add-on called SustainabilityXpress, and PTC’s Windchill Product Analytics makes LCA results an integral part of product development systems. At the whole building design level, different tools are available in different parts of the world. For example, the ATHENA® Impact Estimator for Buildings is capable of modeling 95% of the building stock in North America, Envest has been developed by the Building Research Establishment to meet UK needs, and EcoQuantum is available in the Netherlands. For the Netherlands, extensive databases (open access) are available on the so called eco-costs and carbon footprint of buildings and its components,. The European Council of Construction Economists is planning to develop such open source databases for other European countries as well. At a building assembly level (e.g., exterior walls) the free ATHENA® EcoCalculator for Assemblies is an example of a tool that serves North America and the Whole Building Design Guide is an example of a tool applicable to the UK.

Based on a survey of LCA practitioners carried out in 2006 LCA is mostly used to support business strategy (18%) and R&D (18%), as input to product or process design (15%), in education (13%) and for labeling or product declarations (11%).

Major corporations all over the world are either undertaking LCA in house or commissioning studies, while governments support the development of national databases to support LCA. Of particular note is the growing use of LCA for ISO Type III labels called Environmental Product Declarations, defined as "quantified environmental data for a product with pre-set categories of parameters based on the ISO 14040 series of standards, but not excluding additional environmental information". These third-party certified LCA-based labels provide an increasingly important basis for assessing the relative environmental merits of competing products.

LCA also has major roles in environmental impact assessment, integrated waste management and pollution studies.

Cradle-to-grave

Cradle-to-grave is the full Life Cycle Assessment from resource extraction ('cradle') to use phase and disposal phase ('grave'). For example, trees produce paper, which can be recycled into low-energy production cellulose (fiberised paper) insulation, then used as an energy-saving device in the ceiling of a home for 40 years, saving 2,000 times the fossil-fuel energy used in its production. After 40 years the cellulose fibers are replaced and the old fibers are disposed of, possibly incinerated. All inputs and outputs are considered for all the phases of the life cycle.

Cradle-to-gate

Cradle-to-gate is an assessment of a partial product life cycle from resource extraction (cradle) to the factory gate (i.e., before it is transported to the consumer). The use phase and disposal phase of the product are omitted in this case. Cradle-to-gate assessments are sometimes the basis for environmental product declarations (EPD) termed business-to-business EDPs.

 Cradle-to-cradle or open loop production

Cradle-to-cradle is a specific kind of cradle-to-grave assessment, where the end-of-life disposal step for the product is a recycling process. It is a method used to minimize the environmental impact of products by employing sustainable production, operation, and disposal practices and aims to incorporate social responsibility into product development. From the recycling process originate new, identical products (e.g., asphalt pavement from discarded asphalt pavement, glass bottles from collected glass bottles), or different products (e.g., glass wool insulation from collected glass bottles).

Allocation of burden for products in open loop production systems presents considerable challenges for LCA. Various methods, such as the avoided burden approach have been proposed to deal with the issues involved.

Gate-to-gate

Gate-to-gate is a partial LCA looking at only one value-added process in the entire production chain. Gate-to-gate modules may also later be linked in their appropriate production chain to form a complete cradle-to-gate evaluation.

 Well-to-wheel

Well-to-wheel is the specific LCA used for transport fuels and vehicles. The analysis is often broken down into stages entitled "well-to-station", or "well-to-tank", and "station-to-wheel" or "tank-to-wheel", or "plug-to-wheel". The first stage, which incorporates the feedstock or fuel production and processing and fuel delivery or energy transmission, and is called the "upstream" stage, while the stage that deals with vehicle operation itself is sometimes called the "downstream" stage. The well-to-wheel analysis is commonly used to assess total energy consumption, or energy conversion efficiency and emissions impact of marine vessels, aircrafts and motor vehicle emissions, including their carbon footprint, and the fuels used in each of these transport modes.

Economic input–output life cycle assessment

Economic input–output LCA (EIOLCA) involves use of aggregate sector-level data on how much environmental impact can be attributed to each sector of the economy and how much each sector purchases from other sectors.^[20] Such analysis can account for long chains (for example, building an automobile requires energy, but producing energy requires vehicles, and building those vehicles requires energy, etc.), which somewhat alleviates the scoping problem of process LCA; however, EIOLCA relies on sector-level averages that may or may not be representative of the specific subset of the sector relevant to a particular product and therefore is not suitable for evaluating the environmental impacts of products. Additionally the translation of economic quantities into environmental impacts is not validated.

Ecologically-based LCA

While a conventional LCA uses many of the same approaches and strategies as an Eco-LCA, the latter considers a much broader range of ecological impacts. It was designed to provide a guide to wise management of human activities by understanding the direct and indirect impacts on ecological resources and surrounding ecosystems. Developed by Ohio State University Center for resilience, Eco-LCA is a methodology that quantitatively takes into account regulating and supporting services during the life cycle of economic goods and products. In this approach services are categorized in four main groups: supporting, regulating provisioning and cultural services.

Life cycle energy analysis

Life cycle energy analysis (LCEA) is an approach in which all energy inputs to a product are accounted for, not only direct energy inputs during manufacture, but also all energy inputs needed to produce components, materials and services needed for the manufacturing process. An earlier term for the approach was energy analysis.

Energy production

It is recognized that much energy is lost in the production of energy commodities themselves, such as nuclear energy, photovoltaic electricity or high-quality petroleum products. Net energy content is the energy content of the product minus energy input used during extraction and conversion, directly or indirectly. A controversial early result of LCEA claimed that manufacturing solar cells requires more energy than can be recovered in using the solar cellThe result was refuted. Another new concept that flows from life cycle assessments is Energy Cannibalism. Energy Cannibalism refers to an effect where rapid growth of an entire energy-intensive industry creates a need for energy that uses (or cannibalizes) the energy of existing power plants. Thus during rapid growth the industry as a whole produces no energy because new energy is used to fuel the embodied energy of future power plants. Work has been undertaken in the UK to determine the life cycle energy (alongside full LCA) impacts of a number of renewable technologies.^[22][23]