Life Cycle Systems Group, GECOS, ENAC, Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology-Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. Gerald.
Rebitzer@epfl.ch
Sustainable development requires methods and tools to
measure and compare the environmental impacts of human activities for the
provision 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).
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