Life Cycle Assessments

What is a Life Cycle Assessment?

A life cycle assessment (also known as life cycle analysis, life cycle inventory, ecobalance, cradle-to-grave-analysis, well-to-wheel analysis, and dust-to-dust energy cost) is the assessment of the environmental impact of a given product or service throughout its lifespan.

The goal of LCA is to compare the environmental performance of products and services, to be able to choose the least burdensome one. The term 'life cycle' refers to the notion that a fair, holistic assessment requires the assessment of raw material production, manufacture, distribution, use and disposal including all intervening transportation steps. This is the life cycle of the product. The concept also can be used to optimize the environmental performance of a single product (ecodesign) or to optimize the environmental performance of a company. The term 'emergy' is often used as an analysis tool to determine embodied energy.

The pollution caused by usage also is part of the analysis. For a hydro electric power plant, for example, construction pollution is considered, but so is the decay in biomass on land flooded to create the dam because it cannot absorb CO2 anymore. This biomass decay is called "CO2 equivalent".

Common categories of assessed damages are global warming (greenhouse gases), acidification, smog, ozone layer depletion, eutrophication, ecotoxic and anthropotoxic pollutants, desertification, land use as well as depletion of minerals and fossil fuels.

Source: Wikipedia: Life Cycle Assesment

Life Cycle Assessment & Exhibit Design

A material's life cycle begins in the raw material, and includes the energy and other resources necessary for its extraction, shipping, manufacturing, marketing, fabrication, and disposal, as well as the byproducts that result from these processes, such as airborne waste, water effluents, and solid waste. The life cycle of an aluminum framework, for example, requires a tremendous amount of energy to mine the bauxite ore and manufacture the aluminum pieces. The process also creates industrial and mining waste, and water and air pollution. Shipping it to you consumes energy and often requires packaging (with its own life cycle). Tossing that aluminum in a landfill means it will stay there for hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of years. But recycling that structure into new aluminum products saves 95 percent of the energy it would take to make the products from ore. (Excerpt from Environmental Considerations: Some Guidelines for Exhibit Developers)

LCA Software tools

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[originally published at GreenDesignWiki.com]