Attributional life cycle assessment

The third trend is the increasing amount of environmental information that manufacturers communicate to customers. Three general approaches for communicating environmental attributes to corporate procurement and consumers have emerged eco-labels, self-declaration, and life cycle assessment. 

Full hfe-cycle assessment, a comprehensive method to analyze the environmental attributes of the entire fife cycle of a product, requires environmental engineering expertise. Life cycle assessment is described in Section 4.3. 

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) remains under attack, although the level of attention seems be less than it was in the 1990s. Recently, a life-cycle assessment of PVC and competing materials concluded that, in many applications, environmental impacts of PVC are comparable to those of alternatives. Furthermore, it found that the market share of PVC bottles even in Europe, where they once were very strong, is now minor. This likely reflects the years of environmentally related pressure against PVC use as well as the positive attributes of PET, its main competitor. 

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodological framework for estimating and assessing the environmental impacts attributable to the life cycle of a product, such as climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, tropospheric ozone (smog) creation, eutrophication, acidification, toxicological stress on human health and ecosystems, the depletion of resources, water use, land use, noise, and others [3,4]. 

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) started in the 1960s, with theearliest documented example attributed to Coca-Cola comparing the impact of a glass bottle and a can. LCA is technically defined as an investigation and valuation of the environmental impact of a product or service that is caused or necessitated by... 

Life Cycle Assessment is a methodology to assess the environmental impacts of a product, process or service. The International Organization for Standardization s (ISO) defines Life Cycle Assessment as A systematic set of procedures for compiling and examining the inputs and outputs of materials and energy and the associated environmental impacts directly attributable to the functioning of a product or service throughout its life cycle . 

The yield enhancement was attributed to an increase of the phase interface but not to real sonochemical effects. Tubings with smaller diameters delivered less yield enhancement whereas in tubings with larger diameters the temperature of the reaction mixture was not controllable. By means of concomitant evaluation by simplified life cycle assessment, the authors showed that the environmental impacts of the continuous ester hydrolysis were significantly reduced by ultrasound application despite the higher energy demand. 

A fundamental objective of a computer system applied to automate a pharmaceutical GMP operation is to ensure the quality attributes of the drug product are upheld throughout the manufacturing process. It is therefore important that quality-critical parameters are determined and approved early in the validation life cycle. The exercise should be undertaken to a written procedure with base information from the master product/production record file examined and quality-critical parameter values and limits documented and approved for the process and its operation. In addition, the process and instrument diagrams (P IDs) should be reviewed to confirm the measurement and control components that have a direct impact on the quality-critical parameters and data. This exercise should be carried out by an assessment team made up of user representatives with detailed knowledge of both the computer system application and process, and with responsibility for product quality, system operational use, maintenance, and project implementation. This exercise may be conducted as part of an initial hazard and operability study (HAZOP) and needs to confirm the quality-related critical parameters for use in (or referenced by) the computer control system URS. 

These indicators have been developed mainly to be applied at the industry level, for monitoring and benchmarking, using economic value to measure products or services. Another difference is that, while EATOS and the EQ summarize environmental impact as a general attribute, expressed by potential environmental impact/ environmental unfriendliness factors, IChemE indicators measure particular environmental problems, such as toxicity or acidification. This problem-oriented approach used by IChemE is based on the Life Cycle Impact Assessment framework that will be discussed later. 

Step 5 of the master planning process involves performing both an economic and a qnalitative assessment of the alternative plans of action. The economic evalnation shonld consist of a time-valne-of-money assessment of the total life-cycle costs of competing alternative plans of action. The qnalitative assessment of alternatives reqnires that the alternatives be snbjectively compared on snch attributes as personnel safety, flexibility, ease of implementation, maintainahitity, potential product damage, and so forth. 

Step lb There are CMA requirements which may not be readily derived from Step la, but are attributable to vulnerabilities and/or systemic errors in the design, build or operation of the system (i.e. systemic errors). The reason such additional assessment is required is due to the ease of designing a system which is complex to use, difficult to maintain and hard to recover in the event of failures/malfunctions. If something can be done incorrectly during the system life cycle, then at some point in time, chances are that it will be done incorrectly. Failure to consider the impact of design on expected human performance may lead to gross misjudgement of both total system safety and operational effectiveness. 

The last question is to determine if we could use such data for reliability prediction. Early in the process, for example, at the requirements definition and analysis phase, our knowledge of the attributes and characteristics of the software development process is limited coding personnel and coding languages are undetermined, the design approach may not be defined, etc. Hence, our reliabihty assessment will be uncertain. The more we move into the life cycle process, the more information becomes available, and hence our uncertainty bound reduces. Let us call M the model of the process, that is, the set of characteristics that define the process. The characteristics of such model may include... 

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