Life cycle assessment impact categories

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) considering the impact category global warming... 

The second step and the focus of this chapter was to evaluate the emission load of individual foods from the list of most common foods. There was used the simplified Life Cycle Assessment method in which only the Climate change Impact category was assessed. Detailed description of the LCA methodology is shown in the literature review, the following text describes practical method implementation.Food emission load evaluation using the LCA method... 

Owens JW. LCA Impact Assessment Categories. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. 1996 1(3) 151-158. DOI 10.1007/BF02978944... 

Impact, ceramics, 5 630 Impact analysis activities, EIA, 10 236 Impact analysis, EIA, 10 240t Impact assessment types, 10 230, 231t Impact categories, in life cycle assessment, 14 817-818... 

The quantitative assessment of environmental impacts can be made using life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, which accounts for both inputs and emissions. LCA can be used to identify the major environmental impact categories and the sources of those impacts within a chemical processing plant. LCA can also be used to identify the major contributions to environmental impact within a product s life cycle. Impact scores derived from LCA can be used along with economic assessment scores and social indicators to provide indicators of overall sustainability of processes and products. Economic assessments are often limited through failure to account for all internal costs and especially the external costs associated with waste. 

FIGURE 61.3 LCA midpoint and endpoint impact categories. (From UNEP/SETAC LCI, Towards a life cycle sustainability assessment Making informed choices on products, Job Number DTI/1412/PA, Stockholm, 86p, 2011 Jolliet, O. et al., Int. J. Life Cycle Assess., 8(6), 324, 2003.)... 

In doing life cycle assessments, it is useful to consider the three major categories of products, processes, and facilities, all of which have environmental and resource impacts (Figure 14.5). Products are obviously the things and commodities that consumers use. They are discussed further in Section 14.5. Processes refer to the ways in which products are made. Facilities consist of the infrastructural elements in which products are made and distributed. 

The life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is used to assess the results of the LCA and evaluate the impact on the environment in the various impact categories. These impact categories include, for example, human health, GWP, energy, water use, eutrophication, ozone depletion, aquatic toxicity, and land use (ISO, 2006b). LCA may focus on one or more impact categories. The results may be normalized, weighted, and aggregated in optional steps of the LCIA for comparison to political objectives, for example. In addition, sensitivity analyses are often conducted over the entire LCA to evaluate the variation in the results due to selected factors. 

The inventory results should be presented in clear form, how much and what substances from the environment enter the system and how much get out. These results serve for subsequent life cycle impact assessment [48], The aim of the life cycle impact assessment is to measurably compare the environmental impacts of product systems and to compare their severity with new quantifiable variables identified as impact category. The impact categories are areas of specific environmental problems such as global warming, climate changes, acidification, eutrophication, ecotoxicity and others. Already in the phase of definition of the LCA study scope, it is necessary to describe what impact category will be applied and which of their environmental mechanisms will serve as a basis for impact assessment [46],... 

The life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) may be restricted to one or a few impact categories, where additives do not contribute much. 

As mentioned above, there are characterization factors for a number of different impact categories, e.g. acidification, eutrophication, climate change, human toxicity and ecotoxicity. However, characterization factors are missing for many additives, especially for human toxicity and ecotoxicity, which makes it difficult to assess the potential impact that a product will cause during its entire life cycle. A major reason that characterization factors are often missing is the lack of data regarding substance properties, such as physical chemical properties and toxicity. 

The aim of the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) is to facilitate the interpretation of the results of the inventory analysis. The result of the inventory analysis is an emission profile for each alternative system. In this study the emission profile is the total of all emissions to air, water and soil from the grave-to-cradle chain for the use of cushion vinyl floor covering, including the up chain processes, like electricity production and the down chain processes, like the incineration and landfill of the waste. Such an emission profile may consist of hundreds of emissions and extractions. In LCA impact assessment the total of interventions (emissions, extractions) of a process chain is evaluated in terms of environmental problems (impact categories). 

The overall indicator results of an LCIA reflect cumulative contributions to different impact categories that are summed over time and space. Unlike some other assessment approaches, these indicator results usually do not reflect risks or impacts at any particular location or point in time. The consumption of resources and the generation of wastes, emissions, etc., often occur in a product s life cycle ... 

Determining the impact assessment requires classification of each impact into one of these categories, characterization of the impact to establish some kind of relationship between the energy or materials input/output and a corresponding natural resource/human health/ecological impact, and finally the evaluation of the actual environmental effects. Many life cycle analyses admit that this last phase involves social, political, ethical, administrative, and financial judgments and that the quantitative analyses obtained in the characterization phase are only instruments by which to justify policy. A truly scientific life cycle analysis would end at the characterization phase, as many of the decisions made beyond that point are qualitative and subjective in nature. 

The resirlts of life-cycle impact assessment (LCIA) provide relative indicators of environmental impact. Eight categories for LCIA ate defined in Table 6. Details regarding how to use life cycle impact assessment categories are provided in Bamthouse et al. (1998) and Graedel and AUenby (1995). 

TABLE 6 Environmental Categories for Life-Cycle Impact Assessment... 

Goedkoop, M.J., Heijungs, R., Huijbregts, M., De Schryver, A., Stmijs, J., VanZebn, R., 2008. ReCiPe 2008, A Life Cycle Impact Assessment Method Which Comprises Harmonised Category Indicators at the Midpoint and the Endpoint LeveL first ed. Report I Characterisation 6 January 2009. Retrieved from http //www.lda-recipe.net. 

The case study for two merino wool apparel items showed for the first time the relative contributions of each phase in the full life cycle across multiple impact or resource use categories. In this assessment, socks and a long-sleeved T-shirt garment were produced from NZ merino wool, with processing and manufacture involving facilities in China, Mexico, Vietnam and the US for retail in the US or Europe. For the GWP impact using biophysical allocation, production on farm represented one-third to half of the life cycle GHG emissions, while processing was 30—35% of the total. 

From Table 13.5, it is evident that if the cotton bags are not reused, this wUl pose a very severe threat to the environment, and if they are used 173 times (as determined by this particular study), the environmental impacts are significantly reduced. From the life cycle impact assessment results, it was noticed that the material extraction and production contributed to almost more than 98% to all the impact categories (this might be... 

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