Recent developments in Life Cycle Assessment

Finnveden, Göran; Hauschild, Michael Zwicky; Ekvall, Tomas; Guinée, Jeroen B.; Heijungs, Reinout; Hellweg, Stefanie; Koehler, Annette; Pennington, David; Suh, Sangwon

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2009.06.018

Cited by 2,195 publications

(1,290 citation statements)

References 176 publications

(175 reference statements)

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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 basic structure of LCA includes objective definition and scope de-termination, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and im-provement analysis. Recently, LCA has been widely used in the fields of energy utilization and environmental impact as-sessment of the product or service system (Finnveden et al 2009;Distsele and Awuah 2012;Liang et al 2013), and most of them are directly or indirectly related to the coal resources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Study on each phase characteristics of the whole coal life cycle and their ecological risk assessment—a case of coal in China

Dai

Jiang

Yan

et al. 2016

Environ Sci Pollut Res

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The paper divided the whole coal life cycle, ex-plained each phase characteristics, and took coal mine in China as a study case to assess the ecological risk in coal utilization phase. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) the whole coal life cycle is divided into coal mining, process-ing, transportation, utilization, and waste disposal. (2) The key points of production organization and characteristics in the five phases have great differences. The coal mining phase is characterized by the damage of the key ecological factors (water, soil, atmosphere, vegetation, etc.) damaged while the coal processing phase by discharging waste. The characteris-tics in coal transportation phase mainly performance as escap-ing and migration of atmospheric pollutants. In coal utilization phase, the main characteristics are aggravation of greenhouse effect. The main characteristics of waste disposal phase are accumulation of negative ecological effects on the land. (3) The ecological risk of soil heavy metals is serious in coal utilization phase. The potential ecological hazard coefficients of Pb and As in coal, residue and ash are all lower than 40, presenting low environmental impact on soil; the potential ecological risk coefficients of Cd are higher than 60, nearly half of their potential ecological risk coefficients are higher than 160, which presents high environmental pollution impact on soil; Hg's potential ecological risk coefficients are higher than 320, presenting the highest environmental pollution im-pact on soil; the comprehensive pollution indexes in coal, residue, and ash are relatively high, which means the pollution hazard potential to soil environment is high. (4) The ecologi-cal risk of the atmospheric solid suspended matter is relatively strong in coal utilization phase. The ecological risk of Cd and As in primary flue gas is both lower than net flue gas. The geoaccumulation indexes of Cd and Hg in primary flue gas and net flue gas are both higher than 5, presenting the very strong ecological risk; 50 % of the geoaccumulation index values of As are between 3 and 4, which has also presenting a strong ecological risk while Pb does not present the ecolog-ical risk characterization.

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“…The LCA approach has been evolved in several directions, see e.g. Udo de Haes et al (2004) and Finnveden et al (2009) who summarise recent developments. One can also see the emergence of broader life cycle thinking that goes beyond the limitations of a single analytical tool (Heiskanen, 2002).…”

Section: Life Cycle Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industrial Ecology in Policy Making: What is Achievable and What is Not?

Pothen

2010

SSRN Journal

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Recent developments in Life Cycle Assessment

Cited by 2,195 publications

References 176 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

Study on each phase characteristics of the whole coal life cycle and their ecological risk assessment—a case of coal in China

Industrial Ecology in Policy Making: What is Achievable and What is Not?

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