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1.
Goal, Scope and Background
A number of impact assessment methodologies are available to the LCA practitioner. They differ, and often there is not one obvious choice among them. The question therefore naturally arises: ‘Does it make any difference to my conclusions which method I choose?’ To investigate this issue, a comparison is performed of three frequently applied life cycle impact assessment methods.Methods
The three life cycle impact assessment methods EDIP97 [1], CML2001 [2] and Eco-indicator 99 [3] are compared on their performance through application to the same life cycle inventory from a study of a water-based UV-lacquer. EDIP97 and CML2001 are both midpoint approaches and hence quite similar in their scope and structure, and this allows a comparison during both characterisation and normalisation. The third impact assessment method Eco-indicator 99 is an endpoint method and different in scope and structure from the other two. A detailed comparison can not be done but a comparative analysis of the main contributors to the Eco-indicator 99 results and the weighted and aggregated EDIP97 results is performed.Results and Discussion
Following a translation into common units of the EDIP97 and CML2001 output, differences up to two orders of magnitude are found for some of the indicator results for the impact categories describing toxicity to humans and ecosystems, and there is little similarity in the patterns of major contributors among the two methods. For human toxicity the CML2001 score is dominated by contribution from metals while the EDIP97 score is caused by a solvent and nitrogen oxides. For aquatic ecotoxicity, metals are the main contributors for both methods but while it is vanadium for CML2001, it is strontium for EDIP97. After normalisation, the differences are reduced but still considerable. For the other impact categories, the two methods show only minor differences. The comparison of the main contributors to the Eco-indicator 99 results and the weighted and aggregated EDIP97 results identifies nitrogen oxides as the main contributor for both methods. It is, however, much more dominant for Eco-indicator 99 while the EDIP97 score represents important contributions from a number of different substances, and furthermore, the analysis reveals that the aggregated scores for the two methods come from different impacts. It is thus difficult to extend the findings for these two methods to other inventories.Conclusion
For EDIP97 and CML2001, it mainly matters which method is used if the chemical impacts on human health and ecosystem health are important for the study. For the other impact categories, the differences are minor for these two methodologies. For EDIP97 and Eco-indicator 99, the patterns of most important contributors to the weighted and aggregated impact scores are rather different, and considering the known differences in the underlying framework and models, the results of the two methods may well go in opposite directions for some inventories even if the conclusion is the same for the inventory studied in this paper.Recommendations and Oudook
Particularly for the impact categories representing toxic impacts from chemicals, the study demonstrates the need for more a detailed analysis of the causes underlying the big differences revealed between the methods.2.
Chiu Chuen Onn Sumiani Yusoff 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2010,15(9):985-993
Background, aim, and scope
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an emerging supporting tool designed to help practitioner in systematically assessing the environmental performance of selected product’s life cycle. A product’s life cycle includes the extraction of raw materials, production, and usage, and ends with waste treatment or disposal. Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) as a part of LCA is a method used to derive the environmental burdens from selected product’s stages. LCIA is structured in classification, characterization, normalization and weighting. Presently most of the LCIA practices use European database to establish the characterization, normalization and weighting value. However, using these values for local LCA practice might not be able to reflect the actual Malaysian’s environmental scenario. The aim of this study is to create a Malaysian version of normalization and weighting value using the pollution database within Malaysia. 相似文献3.
Frank Werner Hans-Jörg Althaus Klaus Richter Roland W. Scholz 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2007,12(3):160-172
Background
In product life cycle assessment (LCA), the attribution of environmental interventions to a product under study is an ambiguous task. This is due to a) the simplistic modeling characteristics in the life cycle inventory step (LCI) of LCA in view of the complexity of our techno-economic system, and b) to the nontangible theoretical nature of the product system as a representation of the processes ‘causally’ linked to a product. Ambiguous methodological decisions during the setup of an LCI include the modeling of end-of-life scenarios or the choice of an allocation factor for the allocation of joint co-production processes. An important criterion for methodological decisions — besides the conformity with the relevant series of standards ISO 14 040 — is if the improvement options, which can be deduced from the LCI, are perceived by the decision-maker as to redirect the material flows at stake into more sustainable paths. 相似文献4.
Background, aim, and scope
Many studies evaluate the results of applying different life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods to the same life cycle inventory (LCI) data and demonstrate that the assessment results would be different with different LICA methods used. Although the importance of uncertainty is recognized, most studies focus on individual stages of LCA, such as LCI and normalization and weighting stages of LCIA. However, an important question has not been answered in previous studies: Which part of the LCA processes will lead to the primary uncertainty? The understanding of the uncertainty contributions of each of the LCA components will facilitate the improvement of the credibility of LCA.Methodology
A methodology is proposed to systematically analyze the uncertainties involved in the entire procedure of LCA. The Monte Carlo simulation is used to analyze the uncertainties associated with LCI, LCIA, and the normalization and weighting processes. Five LCIA methods are considered in this study, i.e., Eco-indicator 99, EDIP, EPS, IMPACT 2002+, and LIME. The uncertainty of the environmental performance for individual impact categories (e.g., global warming, ecotoxicity, acidification, eutrophication, photochemical smog, human health) is also calculated and compared. The LCA of municipal solid waste management strategies in Taiwan is used as a case study to illustrate the proposed methodology.Results
The primary uncertainty source in the case study is the LCI stage under a given LCIA method. In comparison with various LCIA methods, EDIP has the highest uncertainty and Eco-indicator 99 the lowest uncertainty. Setting aside the uncertainty caused by LCI, the weighting step has higher uncertainty than the normalization step when Eco-indicator 99 is used. Comparing the uncertainty of various impact categories, the lowest is global warming, followed by eutrophication. Ecotoxicity, human health, and photochemical smog have higher uncertainty.Discussion
In this case study of municipal waste management, it is confirmed that different LCIA methods would generate different assessment results. In other words, selection of LCIA methods is an important source of uncertainty. In this study, the impacts of human health, ecotoxicity, and photochemical smog can vary a lot when the uncertainties of LCI and LCIA procedures are considered. For the purpose of reducing the errors of impact estimation because of geographic differences, it is important to determine whether and which modifications of assessment of impact categories based on local conditions are necessary.Conclusions
This study develops a methodology of systematically evaluating the uncertainties involved in the entire LCA procedure to identify the contributions of different assessment stages to the overall uncertainty. Which modifications of the assessment of impact categories are needed can be determined based on the comparison of uncertainty of impact categories.Recommendations and perspectives
Such an assessment of the system uncertainty of LCA will facilitate the improvement of LCA. If the main source of uncertainty is the LCI stage, the researchers should focus on the data quality of the LCI data. If the primary source of uncertainty is the LCIA stage, direct application of LCIA to non-LCIA software developing nations should be avoided. 相似文献5.
Marguerite Anne Renouf Robert J. Pagan Malcolm K. Wegener 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2011,16(2):125-137
Purpose
This work generates attributional life cycle assessment (LCA) results for products produced from Australian sugarcane—raw sugar, molasses, electricity (from bagasse combustion), and ethanol (from molasses). It focuses on cane processing in sugar mills and is a companion to the work presented in (Renouf et al. 2010), where the focus is on cane growing. This work also examines the preferred approach for assigning impacts to the multiple products from cane processing, and the influence that variability in cane growing has on the results. 相似文献6.
Valentina Prado Ben A. Wender Thomas P. Seager 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2017,22(12):2018-2029
Purpose
Identification of environmentally preferable alternatives in a comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) can be challenging in the presence of multiple incommensurate indicators. To make the problem more manageable, some LCA practitioners apply external normalization to find those indicators that contribute the most to their respective environmental impact categories. However, in some cases, these results can be entirely driven by the normalization reference, rather than the comparative performance of the alternatives. This study evaluates the influence of normalization methods on interpretation of comparative LCA to facilitate the use of LCA in decision-driven applications and inform LCA practitioners of latent systematic biases. An alternative method based on significance of mutual differences is proposed instead.Methods
This paper performs a systematic evaluation of external normalization and describes an alternative called the overlap area approach for the purpose of identifying relevant issues in a comparative LCA. The overlap area approach utilizes the probability distributions of characterized results to assess significant differences. This study evaluates the effects in three LCIA methods, through application of four comparative studies. For each application, we call attention to the category indicators highlighted by each interpretation approach.Results and discussion
External normalization in the three LCIA methods suffers from a systematic bias that emphasizes the same impact categories regardless of the application. Consequently, comparative LCA studies that employ external normalization to guide a selection may result in recommendations dominated entirely by the normalization reference and insensitive to data uncertainty. Conversely, evaluation of mutual differences via the overlap area calls attention to the impact categories with the most significant differences between alternatives. The overlap area approach does not show a systematic bias across LCA applications because it does not depend on external references and it is sensitive to changes in uncertainty. Thus, decisions based on the overlap area approach will draw attention to tradeoffs between alternatives, highlight the role of stakeholder weights, and generate assessments that are responsive to uncertainty.Conclusions
The solution to the issues of external normalization in comparative LCAs proposed in this study call for an entirely different algorithm capable of evaluating mutual differences and integrating uncertainty in the results.7.
PIQET: the design and development of an online ‘streamlined’ LCA tool for sustainable packaging design decision support 总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1
Karli L. Verghese Ralph Horne Andrew Carre 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2010,15(6):608-620
Background, aim and scope
‘Streamlined’ life cycle assessment (LCA) tools hold out the possibility of providing LCA information quickly and easily in order to support a variety of decision-making environments and situations. The utility of such tools is closely related to the accuracy needs and possibilities, and the particular decisions to be supported. In order to facilitate the provision and application of LCA information in decision making during packaging design, development and utilisation, there is a prima facia case for a ‘streamlined’ LCA tool, provided it meets a set of requirements, including functionality, accuracy, validity, reliability and usability. 相似文献8.
Hazel V. Rowley Sven Lundie Gregory M. Peters 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2009,14(6):508-516
Background, aim, and scope
One barrier to the further implementation of LCA as a quantitative decision-support tool is the uncertainty created by the diversity of available analytical approaches. This paper compares conventional (‘process analysis’) and alternative (‘input–output analysis’) approaches to LCA, and presents a hybrid LCA model for Australia that overcomes the methodological limitations of process and input–output analysis and enables a comparison between the results achieved using each method. A case study from the water industry illustrates this comparison. 相似文献9.
John Harvey Alissa Kendall Nick Santero Thomas Van Dam In-Sung Lee Ting Wang 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2011,16(9):944-946
Purpose
A workshop was convened on life cycle assessment (LCA) applied to pavement. The workshop’s primary goals were to establish common practices for conducting LCAs for pavements. In general, pavement LCA has been implemented without clear guidelines for modeling assumptions and reporting. This shortcoming has led to challenges in interpreting and comparing pavement LCA outcomes. 相似文献10.
Florent Querini Jean-Christophe Béziat Stéphane Morel Valérie Boch Patrick Rousseaux 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2011,16(5):454-464
Purpose
As new alternative automotive fuels are being developed, life cycle assessment (LCA) is being used to assess the sustainability of these new options. A fuel LCA is commonly referred as a “Well To Wheels” analysis and calculates the environmental impacts of producing the fuel (the “Well To Tank” stage) and using it to move a car (the “Tank To Wheels” stage, TTW). The TTW environmental impacts are the main topic of this article. 相似文献11.
Can B. Aktas Melissa M. Bilec 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2012,17(3):337-349
Purpose
Many life cycle assessment (LCA) studies do not adequately address the actual lifetime of buildings and building products, but rather assume a typical value. The goal of this study was to determine the impact of lifetime on residential building LCA results. Including accurate lifetime data into LCA allows a better understanding of a product’s environmental impact that would ultimately enhance the accuracy of LCA results. 相似文献12.
Jens Brøbech Legarth Stellan Åkesson Alena Ashkin Anne -Marie Imrell 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2000,5(1):47-58
The screening level LCA places itself amongst the many approaches to LCA, including full LCA and streamlined LCA. The screening
level LCA combines the quantitative nature of the full LCA with the low effort of the streamlined LCA. This paper presents,
as an example, a screening level LCA of the EU 2000 air handling unit from ABB Ventilation Products AB, Sweden, using the
Danish EDIP impact assessment method, the EDIP software and database. This study proved that major improvement potentials
can indeed be identified with screening level LCA, and argues that the screening level LCA is a suitable approach in the early
stages of a company’s life cycle engineering efforts
Contact for the screening level LCA method Corresponding author at ABB Corporate Research 相似文献
13.
14.
Gert Van Hoof Marisa Vieira Maria Gausman Annie Weisbrod 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2013,18(8):1568-1580
Purpose
With an ever increasing list of indicators available, life cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners face the challenge of effectively communicating results to decision makers. Simplification of LCA is often limited to an arbitrary selection of indicators, use of single scores by using weighted values or single attribute indicators. These solutions are less attractive to decision makers, since value judgments are introduced or multi-indicator information is lost. Normalization could be a means to narrow the list of indicators by ranking indicators vs. a reference system. This paper shows three different normalization approaches that produce very different ranking of indicators. It is explained how normalization helps maintain a multi-indicator approach while keeping the most relevant indicators, allowing effective decision making.Methods
The approaches are illustrated on a hand dishwashing case study, using ReCiPe as the impact assessment method and taking the European population (year 2000) as the reference situation. Indicators are ranked using midpoint normalization factors, and compared to the ranking from endpoint normalization broken down by midpoint contribution.Results and discussion
Endpoint normalization shows Resources as the most relevant area of protection for this case, closely followed by Human Health and Ecosystem. Broken down by their key driving midpoints, fossil depletion, climate change and, to a lesser extent, particulate matter formation and metal depletion, are most relevant. Midpoint normalization, however, indicates Freshwater Eutrophication, Natural Land Transformation and Toxicity indicators (marine and freshwater ecotoxicity and human toxicity) are most relevant.Conclusions
A three-step approach based on endpoint normalization is recommended to present only the most relevant indicators, allowing more effective decision making instead of communicating all LCA indicators. The selection process breaks out the normalized endpoint results into the most contributing midpoints (relevant indicators) and reports results with midpoint level units. Bias due to lack of data completeness is less of an issue in the endpoint normalization process (compared to midpoint normalization), while midpoint results are less subject to uncertainty (compared to endpoint results). Focusing on the relevant indicators and key contributing unit processes has proven to be effective for non-LCA expert decision makers to understand, use, and communicate complex LCA results. 相似文献15.
Ivan Muñoz Pablo Campra Amadeo R. Fernández-Alba 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2010,15(7):672-681
Purpose
Climate change impacts in life cycle assessment (LCA) are usually assessed as the emissions of greenhouse gases expressed with the global warming potential (GWP). However, changes in surface albedo caused by land use change can also contribute to change the Earth’s energy budget. In this paper we present a methodology for including in LCA the climatic impacts of land surface albedo changes, measured as CO2-eq. emissions or emission offsets. 相似文献16.
Bastien Girod Peter de Haan Roland W. Scholz 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2011,16(1):3-11
Background, aims, and scope
Life cycle assessment (LCA) according to ISO 14040 standard (ISO-LCA) is applied to assess the environmental impact per functional unit of new or modified products. However, new or modified products can also induce demand changes—so-called rebound effects. If overall environmental impact is of interest, there is a need to assess the potential magnitude of such rebound effects and to allow recommendations on how to mitigate these effects. To do so, this study proposes to complement the constant demand assumption (implicitly assumed by the ISO-LCA), commonly known as the ceteris paribus assumption, with a consumption-as-usual assumption allowing a systematic stepwise inclusion of rebound effects. 相似文献17.
Carlos Ricardo Bojacá Eddie Schrevens 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2010,15(3):238-246
Purpose
At the parameter level, data inaccuracy, data gaps, and the use of unrepresentative data have been recognized as sources of uncertainty in life cycle assessment (LCA). In many LCA uncertainty studies, parameter distributions were created based on the measured variability or on “rules of thumb,” but the possible existence of correlation was not explored. The correlation between parameters may alter the sampling space and, thus, yield unrepresentative results. The objective of this article is to describe the effect of correlation between input parameters (and the final product) on the outcome of an uncertainty analysis, carried out for an LCA of an agricultural product. 相似文献18.
Kwame Awuah-Offei Akim Adekpedjou 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2011,16(1):82-89
Background, aim, and scope
In spite of the increasing application of life cycle assessment (LCA) for engineering evaluation of systems and products, the application of LCA in the mining industry is limited. For example, a search in the Engineering Compendex database using the keywords “life cycle assessment” results in 2,257 results, but only 19 are related to the mining industry. Also, mining companies are increasingly adopting ISO 14001 certified environmental management systems (EMSs). A key requirement of ISO certified EMSs is continual improvement, which can be better managed with life cycle thinking. This paper presents a review of the current application of LCA in the mining industry. It discusses the current application, the issues, and challenges and makes relevant recommendations for new research to improve the current situation. 相似文献19.
Junichi Kasai 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2000,5(5):313-316
Experiences with-Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in the Japanese Automotive Industry and the author’s thoughts on how to apply
LCA for automobiles are described. In this paper, LCA applications are categorized into three types:
The idea of the above mentioned categorization and distinctions of LCA applications may also be useful for assembly-based
industries other than the automotive industry. 相似文献
1. | LCA that is strictly based on ISO 14040 series standards → In Japan, this type of LCA studies is used commonly by industry-wide or nation-wide research work, |
2. | LCA that is somehow not consistent with the ISO standards → This type is internally utilized by individual business companies for the purpose of development of environmentally conscious products with discussions about their own subjective judgement and choices, and |
3. | LCA that is completely streamlined in regard to the ISO standards → This type is limited to internal improvement activities for each process or shop in a factory, based on Life Cycle considerations. |
20.
José Potting Ole Hertel Wolfgang Schöpp Annemarie Bastrup-Birk 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2006,11(1):72-80