Theory without practice: a reply to the note from Heijungs on the average versus marginal debate in Life Cycle Impact Assessment

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment -     

The average versus marginal debate in LCIA: paradigm regained

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment -     

From the allocation debate to a substitution paradox in waste bioenergy life cycle assessment studies

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment -     

Towards social life cycle assessment: a quantitative product social impact assessment

Purpose

The main goal of this paper is to present the feasibility of the quantitative method presented in the Product Social Impact Assessment (PSIA) handbook throughout a case study. The case study was developed to assess the social impacts of a tire throughout its entire life cycle. We carried out this case study in the context of the Roundtable for the Product Social Metrics project in which 13 companies develop two methodologies, a qualitative and a quantitative one, for assessing the social impact of product life cycle.

Methods

The quantitative methodology implemented for assessing the social impact of a Run On Flat tire mounted in a BMW 3 series consists of 26 indicators split in three groups. Each group represents a stakeholder group. Primary data of the quantitative indicators were collected along the product life cycle of the Run On Flat by involving the companies, which owned the main steps of the product life cycle. Throughout this case study, an ideal/worst-case scenario was defined for the distance-to-target approach to compare the social performances of more products when they are available.

Results and discussion

The implementation of the PSIA quantitative method to a Run On Flat illustrated the necessity to have a referencing step in order to interpret the results. This is particularly important when the results are used to support decision-making process in which no experts are involved. It frequently happens in a big company where the management level has to take often decisions on different topics. Reference values were defined using ideal or worst-case-target scenarios (Fontes et al. 2014). For those topics where it was possible, an ideal/ethical scenario was defined, e.g., 0 h of child labor per product. In other cases, we defined a worst-case scenario, e.g., 0 training hours per product. It was then possible to interpret the results using a distance-to-target approach. A matrix was developed in the case study for identifying in which step of the product life cycle data is not available; that means we need more transparency in the supply chain.

Conclusions

Each value of the matrix can be compared to the ideal/worst scenario to compare the step to each other and to identify along the product life cycle which step and the relative supplier that needs further measures to improve the product performance. Furthermore, a quantitative value for each indicator related to the product life cycle is calculated and compared with the ideal/worst scenario. The case study on Run On Flat represents the first implementation of the quantitative method of PSIA.

     

Sensitivity to weighting in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA)

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Weighting in life cycle assessment (LCA) incorporates stakeholder preferences in the decision-making process of comparative LCAs. Research...     

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...     

Excluding site-specific data from the lca inventory: how this affects life cycle impact assessment

The exclusion of site-specific data from the inventory phase of an LCA continues to be a point of controversy. Though the current simplified data collection strategy is widely supported by the LCA community, there are still many who are concerned about the implications this limitation has for the utility and reliability of LCA results. This is particularly relevant to practitioners who are attempting to draw conclusions about the environmental performance of different systems for the development of environmental policy. The current site-generic methodology introduces uncertainties into LCA results that have the potential to misdirect decisions on improvement measures. Therefore, in this paper we assess the practicality of collecting site-specific data and examine its value for study interpretation and decision-making. In our case study, we compare the contribution of a number of plastics-based packaging systems to photochemical oxidant formation. Our results demonstrate that the aggregation of photochemical oxidant precursor emissions into a single global parameter is an unreliable indicator of environmental burden and that the real significance of each packaging’ contribution to the formation of photochemical smog in the atmosphere can only be understood after the addition of spatial and temporal information. We conclude that for non-global cumulative impact categories, additional spatial and temporal data should be collected, and that the benefits to decision makers far outweigh the additional effort needed to acquire this data for the LCA inventory.     

Lead industry life cycle studies: environmental impact and life cycle assessment of lead battery and architectural sheet production

Purpose

This paper will give an overview of LCA studies on lead metal production and use recently conducted by the International Lead Association.

Methods

The lead industry, through the International Lead Association (ILA), has recently completed three life cycle studies to assess the environmental impact of lead metal production and two of the products that make up approximately 90 % of the end uses of lead, namely lead-based batteries and architectural lead sheet.

Results and discussion

Lead is one of the most recycled materials in widespread use and has the highest end-of-life recycling rate of all commonly used metals. This is a result of the physical chemical properties of the metal and product design, which makes lead-based products easily identifiable and economic to collect and recycle. For example, the end-of-life collection and recycling rates of lead automotive and industrial batteries and lead sheet in Europe are 99 and 95 %, respectively, making them one of the few products that operate in a true closed loop. These high recycling rates, coupled with the fact that both lead-based batteries and architectural lead sheet are manufactured from recycled material, have a beneficial impact on the results of LCA studies, significantly lowering the overall environmental impact of these products. This means that environmental impacts associated with mining and smelting of lead ores are minimised and in some cases avoided completely. The lead battery LCA assesses not only the production and end of life but also the use phase of these products in vehicles. The study demonstrates that the technological capabilities of innovative advanced lead batteries used in start-stop vehicles significantly offset the environmental impact of their production. A considerable offset is realised through the savings achieved in global warming potential when lead-based batteries are installed in passenger vehicles with start-stop and micro-hybrid engine systems which have significantly lower fuel consumption than regular engines.

Conclusions

ILA has undertaken LCAs which investigate the environmental impact associated with the European production of lead metal and the most significant manufactured lead products (lead-based batteries used in vehicles and architectural lead sheet for construction) to ensure up-to-date and robust data is publically and widely available.

     

ReCiPe2016: a harmonised life cycle impact assessment method at midpoint and endpoint level

Purpose

Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) translates emissions and resource extractions into a limited number of environmental impact scores by means of so-called characterisation factors. There are two mainstream ways to derive characterisation factors, i.e. at midpoint level and at endpoint level. To further progress LCIA method development, we updated the ReCiPe2008 method to its version of 2016. This paper provides an overview of the key elements of the ReCiPe2016 method.

Methods

We implemented human health, ecosystem quality and resource scarcity as three areas of protection. Endpoint characterisation factors, directly related to the areas of protection, were derived from midpoint characterisation factors with a constant mid-to-endpoint factor per impact category. We included 17 midpoint impact categories.

Results and discussion

The update of ReCiPe provides characterisation factors that are representative for the global scale instead of the European scale, while maintaining the possibility for a number of impact categories to implement characterisation factors at a country and continental scale. We also expanded the number of environmental interventions and added impacts of water use on human health, impacts of water use and climate change on freshwater ecosystems and impacts of water use and tropospheric ozone formation on terrestrial ecosystems as novel damage pathways. Although significant effort has been put into the update of ReCiPe, there is still major improvement potential in the way impact pathways are modelled. Further improvements relate to a regionalisation of more impact categories, moving from local to global species extinction and adding more impact pathways.

Conclusions

Life cycle impact assessment is a fast evolving field of research. ReCiPe2016 provides a state-of-the-art method to convert life cycle inventories to a limited number of life cycle impact scores on midpoint and endpoint level.

     

Integrating life cycle assessment and life cycle cost: a review of environmental-economic studies

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - The purpose of this document is to carry out a critical review of the existing literature by specifically addressing the following: (i) the...     

Ecological modernization,techno-politics and social life cycle assessment: a view from human geography

Purpose

Although Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) is a growing field of inquiry and intervention, to date, there has been a dearth of engagement between this field and critical social scientists interested in questions of the societal impacts of goods and services. In response, this paper is written from the perspectives of two human geographers, new to the field of SLCA. Our aim is to offer an ‘outsiders’ perspective of, and commentary on, the growing field of SLCA, which we frame as a form of political intervention that seeks to have real-world impacts on the lives and futures of diverse peoples and places.

Methods

To address these questions, we explore SLCA’s underpinning assumptions by critically reviewing the worldviews that inform its methods, including debates in the literature about sustainable development and corporate social responsibility.

Results and discussion

SLCA’s normative and practical applications resonate strongly with an ecological modernization framework. This framework forwards social change via incremental and institutional interventions that promotes continued development, and privileges objectivity, impartiality and the search for a totalizing knowledge of the impacts of good and services.

Conclusions

Exploring SLCA’s epistemological foundations illuminates, and in turn, can help to address some of the key challenges SLCA currently faces. Drawing attention to SLCA’s inheren raison d’etre encourages more debate about the overall intentions and limits of the field, and represents not a weakness but rather its inherent quality of exploring the complex world of social impacts.

     

Enhancing life cycle impact assessment from climate science: Review of recent findings and recommendations for application to LCA

Since the Global Warming Potential (GWP) was first presented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) First Assessment Report, the metric has been scrutinized and alternative metrics have been suggested. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report gives a scientific assessment of the main recent findings from climate metrics research and provides the most up-to-date values for a subset of metrics and time horizons. The objectives of this paper are to perform a systematic review of available midpoint metrics (i.e. using an indicator situated in the middle of the cause-effect chain from emissions to climate change) for well-mixed greenhouse gases and near-term climate forcers based on the current literature, to provide recommendations for the development and use of characterization factors for climate change in life cycle assessment (LCA), and to identify research needs. This work is part of the ‘Global Guidance on Environmental Life Cycle Impact Assessment’ project held by the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative and is intended to support a consensus finding workshop. In an LCA context, it can make sense to use several complementary metrics that serve different purposes, and from there get an understanding about the robustness of the LCA study to different perspectives and metrics. We propose a step-by-step approach to test the sensitivity of LCA results to different modelling choices and provide recommendations for specific issues such as the consideration of climate-carbon feedbacks and the inclusion of pollutants with cooling effects (negative metric values).