The evolution of life cycle assessment in European policies over three decades

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle thinking (LCT) and life cycle assessment (LCA) are increasingly considered pivotal concept and method for supporting...     

Environmental life cycle implications of upscaling lithium-ion battery production

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle assessment (LCA) literature evaluating environmental burdens from lithium-ion battery (LIB) production facilities lacks an...     

End-of-life modelling of buildings to support more informed decisions towards achieving circular economy targets

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an internationally accepted method to assess the environmental impacts of buildings. A major methodological...     

Accounting for biodiversity in life cycle impact assessments of forestry and agricultural systems—the BioImpact metric

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful method for assessing environmental impacts at large scales. Biodiversity and ecosystem diversity are...     

Distribution of environmental performance in life cycle assessments—implications for environmental benchmarking

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle assessment (LCA) is considered a robust method to analyse the environmental impacts of products and is used in public and private...     

Environmental impact assessment of biomass process chains at early design stages using decision trees

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle assessment (LCA) is generally considered as a suitable methodology for the evaluation of environmental impacts of processes. However,...     

Comparing sources and analysis of uncertainty in consequential and attributional life cycle assessment: review of current practice and recommendations

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle assessment (LCA) is intended as a quantitative decision support tool. However, the large amount of uncertainty characteristic of LCA...     

Costructal law,exergy analysis and life cycle energy sustainability assessment: an expanded framework applied to a boiler

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) is one of the most relevant tools delving in sustainability science, based currently on the triple...     

Inclusion of prevention scenarios in LCA of construction waste management

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been applied extensively for the environmental evaluation of solid waste management. However, there are only a...     

Selection of building thermal insulation materials using robust optimization

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Life cycle assessment (LCA) is commonly used to analyze the environmental profile of a material and product. For example, the selection of...     

Selection of the most appropriate life cycle inventory dataset: new selection proxy methodology and case study application

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Using generic or country-specific life cycle inventory (LCI) datasets for life cycle assessments (LCAs) with no site-specific LCI datasets can...     

Linking land use inventories to biodiversity impact assessment methods

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - There is generally a mismatch in the land use classification of life cycle inventory (LCI) databases and life cycle impact assessment (LCIA)...     

Linking inventories and impact assessment models for addressing biodiversity impacts: mapping rules and challenges

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - An adequate matching between the nomenclature of elementary flows in life cycle inventory (LCI) databases and life cycle impact assessment...     

Psychosocial risk factors’ impact pathway for social life cycle assessment: an application to citrus life cycles in South Italy

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Social life cycle assessment (SLCA) was the last tool to be developed within the framework of life cycle thinking, and since the beginning,...     

Life cycle management: UNEP-workshop

On August 30, 2001, the first in a series of planned global workshops on Life Cycle Management was organized in Copenhagen by UNEP in cooperation with dk-TEKNIK. The workshop provided an international forum to share experiences on LCM. The specific purpose of the workshop was to define the focus of a possible UNEP programme on Life Cycle Management under the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. Life Cycle Management has been defined by the SETAC Europe Working Group on LCM as an integrated framework of concepts, techniques and procedures to address environmental, economic, technological and social aspects of products and organizations to achieve continuous environmental improvement from a life cycle perspective. Life Cycle Management has been requested as an additional component for the Life Cycle Initiative by business organizations as well as governments in order to provide practical approaches for management systems in this area. The breakout groups of the workshop focussed on the role of integrating environmental management practices, concepts and tools in a life cycle perspective, on the integration of socio-economic aspects of sustainability in life cycle approaches, including the definition of adequate indicators for these aspects, on the communication strategies to promote life cycle thinking, and on the demand side of LCA. The workshop closed with a consensus that the UNEP/ SETAC Life Cycle Initiative should really include a programme on Life Cycle Management with the proposed areas of work. UNEP in cooperation with SETAC should function as a global catalyser of knowledge transfer and cooperation on life cycle approaches. The key issue behind all activities would be the promotion of Life Cycle Thinking since all break-out groups mentioned the importance of well-prepared communication strategies. Another interesting outcome of the workshop is the clear interest of different stakeholders in the consideration of social and institutional effects of products, in addition to environmental and economic impacts, i.e. a sustainable development perspective.     

Use of data envelopment analysis to benchmark environmental product declarations—a suggested framework

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Environmental product declarations (EPDs) are standardized tools based on life cycle assessment (LCA) to communicate and compare environmental...     

Operationalisation and application of water supply mix (WSmix) at worldwide scale: how does WSmix influence the environmental profile of water supply for different users?

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - A worldwide-regionalized water supply mix (WSmix) has been developed for use in life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. The WSmix is the...     

Moving from completing system boundaries to more realistic modeling of the economy in life cycle assessment

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Existing process-based life cycle assessment (LCA) models can be supplemented by input-output (IO) models to correct for the so-called...     

Distance-to-target weighting in LCA—A matter of perspective

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - Weighting can enable valuable support for decision-makers when interpreting life cycle assessment (LCA) results. Distance-to-target (DtT)...