Visualisation of LCA environmental impacts of electrical and electronic products using multidimensional scaling

Dimensionality Reduction and Visualization of the Environmental Impacts of Domestic Appliances

“…In a previous article, Gutiérrez and colleagues (2009) used MDS to visualize the environmental impacts of this sample of products using the results of their life cycle impact assessments (LCIA) directly. In this article we extend that approach, carrying out a previous step of dimensionality reduction by selection of a reduced number of variables.…”

“…Because the more complex, three‐dimensional solution produces only a marginally better fit to the data, the two‐dimensional solution (shown in Figure 4a) is accepted. Figure 4b shows the results of applying MDS with all the 11 impact categories, as proposed in work by Gutiérrez and colleagues (2009). It can be seen that the two bidimensional maps are rather coincident, which means that the reduction of variables carried out with the proposed PCA‐based method has been quite successful, given that the loss of information has been minimal and the number of variables to compute for each product has been reduced by 72% (from 11 impact categories to just three).…”

“…In a previous article, Gutiérrez and colleagues (2009) propose to use multidimensional scaling (MDS) to visualize the results of environmental impacts. In this article, we extend that approach by carrying out a reduction of the number of variables—that is, the number of environmental impacts—before applying MDS.…”

Development and integration of a simplified environmental assessment tool based on an environmental categorisation per range of products

“…Up to now, the method commonly used in product categorisation has been based on the hierarchical clustering method (Cox and Cox 2008, Dagher 2008, Gutierrez et al 2009). This is defined as a statistical technique based on a proximity matrix derived from variables measured on objects.…”

“…LCP families were defined by Collado-Ruiz et al as 'a set of products whose LCA shares a common behaviour and can therefore be compared in some practical way'. Furthermore, Gutierrez et al (2009) have applied a similar technique in the electrical and electronic equipments area to analyse environmental impact data (from LCAs) in order to provide consumers and producers with a synthetic description of the environmental impacts of appliances, as well as information on the relative positioning of these products in terms of their environmental performance.…”