Conceptual Aspects for Treatment of Land Use in LCA

Apart from the use of biogenic waste, the feedstock for biobased products is provided from agricultural production of crops or from harvesting of silvicultural products. In both cases, land is the primary resource. However, it has become obvious that land is not simply used continuously in more or less the same way, but that major changes in land use may be induced by a rising demand of biobased products, for example, the conversion of tropical forests into plantations for sugarcane, which alter the quality of land and the respective ecosystems. 

This already points to a basic methodological issue as to accounting for land use in LCA regarding only the fact that a certain amount of, for example, farmland is used for the production of a feedstock, land use may be treated in the framework of LCA simply as a quantitative information in the phase of LCl. The acknowledgment of the environmental relevance of different ways how land may be used, however, is closely related to environmental safeguards, which makes the assessment of land use a native part of impact assessment. Given this double-fold nature, several conceptual ways to treat land use in LCA have been developed. 

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