Life-cycle responsibility

LCA also implies life-cycle responsibility. A combination of increasing external pressures and internal commitments requires a methodology like that embodied in LCA that will enable a company to effectively respond to the global demands for resource management (see table 4.7). 

Bioassays. These are laboratory tests in which the toxicity of a sample is measured by exposing a specific organism and measuring life-cycle responses. 

Robidoux PY et al., TNT, RDX and HMX decrease earthworm (Eisenia andrei) life-cycle responses in a spiked natural forest soil, Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol., 43, 379, 2002. 

There is a trend in Europe and East Asia toward product life cycle responsibility legislation that requires manufacturers to minimize environmental impacts from materieils extraction to manufacturing to distribution/packaging to repair to recycling to disposal. Essentitilly, extended product responsibility shifts the pollution prevention focus from production facilities to the entire product fife cycle (Davis et al. 1997). For example, proposed legislation may require that memufacturers not only recycle in-plant wastes but also recycle their discarded products (Denmark Ministry of the Environment 1992 Davis 1997). The evaluation of life cycle stages and impacts are discussed further in Section 4.3. 

Life-cycle analysis, in principle, allows an objective and complete view of the impact of processes and products on the environment. For a manufacturer, life-cycle analysis requires an acceptance of responsibility for the impact of manufacturing in total. This means not just the manufacturers operations and the disposal of waste created by those operations but also those of raw materials suppliers and product users. 

The importance of time to market has recently been shown to be responsible for over 30% of the total profit to be made from a product during its life-cycle. However, it has been found that nearly 30% of product development programmes overran their planned times (Maylor, 1996 Nichols et al., 1993). The reduction in profit due to late delivery of the product to market is shown in Figure 5.1 for a sample of businesses surveyed. 

The QSR major new requirements are in the areas of design, management responsibility, purchasing, and servicing. It encompasses quality system requirements that apply to the entire life cycle of a device. 

From the above, it can be seen that there is a need for a screening test that is a more specific indicator of drought tolerance than yield itself, that will measure the response of the plant integrated over a substantial part of its life cycle, is non-destructive and can be used for testing large numbers of plants. A test which appears to meet these criteria is carbon isotope... 

Over the past decade, the battery industry, partly in response to public concerns and legislation, has played an active role in finding solutions to these problems. Industry efforts have touched on every stage of the product life cycle. 

For much of its life cycle a parasite s environment is its host. A principal, and potentially lethal, feature of this environment is the host immune response. Diversity in parasites interactions with this aspect of their environment may therefore be expected. The host immune response varies between different hosts and so, if this is considered as a selection pressure, it may produce the ideal conditions for the generation of diversity in immune-mediated parasite-host interactions. 

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