Life cycle impact assessment research developments and needs

Bare, Jane

doi:10.1007/s10098-009-0265-9

Cited by 95 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…Given the consistency of results over diverse applications, it is unlikely this bias is due to an overestimation at inventory level in the product system (as newer inventory libraries become available, this type of evaluation could help point out biases early on). These and other conceptual issues in normalization have been discussed extensively in the literature Sleeswijk et al 2008;Finnveden et al 2009;Bare 2009), but what is most concerning is that these gaps can have such strong influence on the results. It is also concerning that the results obtained in this study are shown repeatedly in the recent literature across a wide range of applications with different temporal and geographical scales including water systems, steel beams, cleaning products, and bioenergy.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpretation of comparative LCAs: external normalization and a method of mutual differences

Prado

Wender

Seager

2017

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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Purpose Identification of environmentally preferable alternatives in a comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) can be challenging in the presence of multiple incommensurate indicators. To make the problem more manageable, some LCA practitioners apply external normalization to find those indicators that contribute the most to their respective environmental impact categories. However, in some cases, these results can be entirely driven by the normalization reference, rather than the comparative performance of the alternatives. This study evaluates the influence of normalization methods on interpretation of comparative LCA to facilitate the use of LCA in decision-driven applications and inform LCA practitioners of latent systematic biases. An alternative method based on significance of mutual differences is proposed instead. Methods This paper performs a systematic evaluation of external normalization and describes an alternative called the overlap area approach for the purpose of identifying relevant issues in a comparative LCA. The overlap area approach utilizes the probability distributions of characterized results to assess significant differences. This study evaluates the effects in three LCIA methods, through application of four comparative studies. For each application, we call attention to the category indicators highlighted by each interpretation approach. Results and discussion External normalization in the three LCIA methods suffers from a systematic bias that emphasizes the same impact categories regardless of the application. Consequently, comparative LCA studies that employ external normalization to guide a selection may result in recommendations dominated entirely by the normalization reference and insensitive to data uncertainty. Conversely, evaluation of mutual differences via the overlap area calls attention to the impact categories with the most significant differences between alternatives. The overlap area approach does not show a systematic bias across LCA applications because it does not depend on external references and it is sensitive to changes in uncertainty. Thus, decisions based on the overlap area approach will draw attention to tradeoffs between alternatives, highlight the role of stakeholder weights, and generate assessments that are responsive to uncertainty. Conclusions The solution to the issues of external normalization in comparative LCAs proposed in this study call for an entirely different algorithm capable of evaluating mutual differences and integrating uncertainty in the results.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpretation of comparative LCAs: external normalization and a method of mutual differences

Prado

Wender

Seager

2017

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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“…The importance of land use and land use changes (LULUC) has long been recognized as a topic to be treated in LCIA [16]. Of the main drivers for biodiversity loss, LULUC is at least partly included [6] in LCA.…”

Section: Open Accessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The debate on how to include LULUC in LCIA has been going on since the early 1990s [16], but despite methodological progress [17][18][19]66], it has been hard to find a clear converging trend. Two main directions can be identified: proposals based on species richness as an indicator for biodiversity and proposals based on other indicators, here collectively denoted as structural and indirect biodiversity indicators [67].…”

Section: Impacts From Land Use On Biodiversity In the Lca Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Why Include Impacts on Biodiversity from Land Use in LCIA and How to Select Useful Indicators?

Michelsen

Lindner

2015

Sustainability

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Abstract:Loss of biodiversity is one of the most severe threats to sustainability, and land use and land use changes are still the single most important factor. Still, there is no sign of any consensus on how to include impacts on biodiversity from land use and land use changes in LCIA. In this paper, different characteristics of biodiversity are discussed and related to proposals on how to include land use and land use changes in LCIA. We identify the question of why we should care about biodiversity as a key question, since different motivations will result in different choices for the indicators, and we call for more openness in the motivation for indicator selection. We find a promising trend in combining pressure indicators with geographic weighting and regard this as a promising way ahead. More knowledge on the consequences of different choices, such as the selection of a reference state, is still needed.

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“…ReCiPe, Eco-indicator 99 [26], and LIME [27] are LCIA methodologies that provide endpoint characterization and include an additional step of grouping and weighting LCIA indicators into damage indicators and then a single score. Although such an approach may better facilitate comparisons, this process inevitably involves judgments that are subject to errors, bias, and misconceptions [10,[28][29][30][31].…”

Section: Life Cycle Assessment Of Product Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrated Metrics for Improving the Life Cycle Approach to Assessing Product System Sustainability

et al. 2014

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Life cycle approaches are critical for identifying and reducing environmental burdens of products. While these methods can indicate potential environmental impacts of a product, current Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods fail to integrate the multiple impacts of a system into unified measures of social, economic or environmental performance related to sustainability. Integrated metrics that combine multiple aspects of system performance based on a common scientific or economic principle have proven to be valuable for sustainability evaluation. In this work, we propose methods of adapting four integrated metrics for use with LCAs of product systems: ecological footprint, emergy, green net value added, and Fisher information. These metrics provide information on the full product system in land, energy, monetary equivalents, and as a unitless information index; each bundled with one or more indicators for reporting. When used together and for relative comparison, integrated metrics provide a broader coverage of sustainability aspects from multiple theoretical perspectives that is more likely to illuminate potential issues than individual impact indicators. These integrated metrics are recommended for use in combination with traditional indicators used in LCA. Future work will test and demonstrate the value of using these integrated metrics and combinations to assess product system sustainability.

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Life cycle impact assessment research developments and needs

Cited by 95 publications

References 77 publications

Interpretation of comparative LCAs: external normalization and a method of mutual differences

Interpretation of comparative LCAs: external normalization and a method of mutual differences

Why Include Impacts on Biodiversity from Land Use in LCIA and How to Select Useful Indicators?

Integrated Metrics for Improving the Life Cycle Approach to Assessing Product System Sustainability

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