Abstract
Sustainable development requires methods and tools
to measure and
compare the environmental impacts of human activities for theprovision
of goods and services (both of which are summarized under the term
‘‘products’’). Environmental impacts include those from emissions into
the environment and through the consumption of resources, as well as
other interventions (e.g., land use) associated with providing products
that occur when extracting resources, producing materials,
manufacturing the products, during consumption/use, and at the
products’ end-of-life (collection/sorting, reuse, recycling, waste
disposal). These emissions and consumptions contribute to a wide range
of impacts, 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, and noise—among others. A clear need,
therefore, exists to be proactive and to provide complimentary
insights, apart from current regulatory practices, to help reduce such
impacts. Practitioners and researchers from many domains come
together
in life cycle assessment (LCA) to calculate indicators of the
aforementioned potential environmental impacts that are linked to
products—supporting the identification of opportunities for pollution
prevention and reductions in resource consumption while taking the
entire product life cycle into consideration. This paper, part 1 in a
series of two, introduces the LCA framework and procedure, outlines how
to define and model a product’s life cycle, and provides an overview of
available methods and tools for tabulating and compiling associated
emissions and resource consumption data in a life cycle inventory
(LCI). It also discusses the application of LCA in industry and policy
making. The second paper, by Pennington et al. (Environ. Int. 2003, in
press), highlights the key features, summarises available approaches,
and outlines the key challenges of assessing the aforementioned
inventory data in terms of contributions to environmental impacts (life
cycle impact assessment, LCIA).
|
