Life Cycle Assessment

This week we take a look at the sustainability performance of products over their entire life cycle, from cradle to cradle. After analyzing the large number of products-chemicals we are in daily contact with, we identify the need for LCA, learn about the motivations to conduct LCAs versus other environmental tools. The goals and system definition step defines the goal and scope of the study, including the product function, functional unit, and the product system and its boundaries

This week we take a look at the sustainability performance of products over their entire life cycle, from cradle to cradle. After analyzing the large number of products-chemicals we are in daily contact with, we identify the need for LCA, learn about the motivations to conduct LCAs versus other environmental tools. The goals and system definition step defines the goal and scope of the study, including the product function, functional unit, and the product system and its boundaries

The Life Cycle Inventory, the second LCA phase, quantifies the inventory of the various elementary flows of resource extractions and substance emissions crossing the system boundary. We first learn how to build the life cycle inventory and determine aggregated elementary flows from cradle to gate. We then establish the energy and CO2 balance for several products, identifying the dominant stages in the life cycle. This module then provide an overview of existing databases, describes in further detail the widespread ecoinvent database, illustrating the inventory via a simple car example.

The chapter finally introduces us to two special topics of importance: the allocation of emission between co-products and the possibilities offered by Input-output allocation to complement the process LCA approach developed in detail in this chapter.