Teaching life cycle assessment in higher education

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Scientific Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) literature provides some examples of LCA teaching in higher education, but not a structured overview of...     

Harmonized rules for future LCAs on pharmaceutical products and processes

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - The manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and their occurrence in the environment generated growing concerns of stakeholders. Life Cycle Assessment...     

Water scarcity in Brazil: part 2—uncertainty assessment in regionalized characterization factors

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Despite recommendations, uncertainty results are rarely incorporated in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies, especially regarding...     

Environmental footprint of cultivating strawberry in Spain

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Strawberry is cultivated worldwide under different production systems. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology has been applied to evaluate...     

The enhanced LCA Resources Directory: a tool aimed at improving Life Cycle Thinking practices

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - To support life cycle-based EU policies, the European Commission created the “European Platform on Life Cycle Assessment (EPLCA).”...     

Health effects of particulate matter formation in Life Cycle Impact Assessment: critical review and recommendation of models for Brazil

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - The impact of particulate matter (PM) formation on human health in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) can be characterized through combining...     

LCA in Japan: policy and progress

A summary of the current Japanese activities related to Life Cycle Assessment are presented with a specific comparison of Life Cycle Impact Assessment in relation to European tendencies. Japanese organizations involved in LCA, recent legislation impacting LCA activities and LCA case studies are also tabulated. The LCA priorities of policy makers and industrialists are discussed in comparison and compared to those in the United States. Projects within the Life Cycle Assessment Society of Japan and the Man-Earth Project are highlighted including the construction of a public LCI data base and the prediction of 21st century environmental crises.     

A taste of the new ReCiPe for life cycle assessment: consequences of the updated impact assessment method on food product LCAs

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Recently, an update of the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) method ReCiPe was released: ReCiPe 2016. The aim of this study was to analyse the...     

EATS: a life cycle-based decision support tool for local authorities and school caterers

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - This paper describes the research that underpins the development of EATS (the Environmental Assessment Tool for School meals), a life...     

From life cycle talking to taking action

Introduction  

The biannual Life Cycle Management conference series aims to create a platform for users and developers of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and related tools to share their experiences. A key concern of the LCM community has been to move beyond the production of LCA reports toward using the developed knowledge. This paper reports and evaluates some of the main outcomes of the 4th International Life Cycle Management Conference (LCM 2009).     

Leveraging life cycle assessment and simplex lattice design in optimizing fossil fuel blends for sustainable desalination

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - This study aims to minimize the environmental impacts of thermal seawater desalination by optimizing the required fossil fuel mixture. Life...     

The Bioeconomy in emerging economies: a study of the critical success factors based on Life Cycle Assessment and Delphi and Fuzzy-Delphi methods

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - The aim of this research was to identify and analyze the critical success factors for Bioeconomy development in Brazil, considering Life Cycle...     

Contribution-based prioritization of LCI database improvements: the most important unit processes in ecoinvent

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Improving the quality and quantity of unit process datasets in Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) databases affects every LCA they are used in. However,...     

Both completing system boundaries and realistic modeling of the economy are of interest for life cycle assessment—a reply to “Moving from completing system boundaries to more realistic modeling of the economy in life cycle assessment” by Yang and Heijungs (2018)

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - As Yang and Heijungs (Int J Life Cycle Assess https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-018-1532-y , 2018) bring forward, there is indeed a need for...     

“Less is better” and “only above threshold”: Two incompatible paradigms for human toxicity in life cycle assessment?

The absence of spatial and temporal information in the data from a typical Life Cycle Inventory puts constraints on the possibilities of subsequent Life Cycle Impact Assessment to predict actual impact. Usual methods for Life Cycle Impact Assessment (often referred to as “less is better” methods) make only limited use of spatial and temporal information, because they predict concentration increases rather than full concentrations. As a consequence it does not seem possible to evaluate whether a threshold value is surpassed. The resulting poor accordance between the predicted impact and the expected occurrence of actual impact is a major problem. This problem is particularly relevant for human toxicity assessment, since the probability of surpassing thresholds here traditionally is the main point of attention. A considerable group of practitioners suggests to follow an “only above threshold” principle by introduction of assessment tools from risk assessment and environmental impact assessment in LCA. Intensive debate is going on about possibilities and limitations of “less is better” and “only above threshold”. The debate is obscured by two underlying discussions (about no-effect-levels and about data-availability) that are partly, but not fully intertwined. Both principles tend to be given fixed positions in these discussions, and are therefore often put forward as fundamentally different and incompatible with each other. This article entwines the discussions, shows parallels between both principles, and uses these parallels to present a new method for Life Cycle Impact Assessment of human toxicity from air emissions that — with limited data requirement from Life Cycle Inventory — can take as well threshold evaluation and spatial source-differentiation into account.     

Creating a “family tree” on fertilizer inventory use in life cycle assessment of oil palm: visualization of earlier studies and its implications

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - This review develops and applies a visualization method for understanding how chemical fertilizer inventory data, including greenhouse gas (GHG)...     

IMPACT World+: a globally regionalized life cycle impact assessment method

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - This paper addresses the need for a globally regionalized method for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), integrating multiple state-of-the-art...     

Decision support for large-scale remediation strategies by fused urban metabolism and life cycle assessment

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - This paper seeks to identify the most environmental friendly way of conducting a refurbishment of Broendby Strand, with focus on PCB...     

Organizational water footprint: a methodological guidance

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - This paper proposes a practical methodological approach to assess the water footprint at the organizational level, in line with the current...