LCA - Life-cycle Assessment Questions and Answers 2023

LCA - Life-cycle Assessment Questions and Answers 2023 The stages of a product life-cycle includes : 1) Material extraction 2) Material Processing 3) Manufacturing 4) Use 5) Retirement During retirement the product can either be re-used, re-made or recycled depending on its quality Re-use -> Retirement back to Use Re-make -> Retirement back to manufacturing Re-cycle -> Retirement to Material Processing When energy and raw materials goes through the stages of product life cycle, its outputs are 1) Usable products 2) Air Eissions 3) Liquid Effluents 4) Solid Waste For example, air emissions being greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous,etc. The impact caused by these outputs could be 1) Ecological health 2) Resource Depletion 3) The Environment Ecological health such as human health ( Ecological health is a term that has been used in relation to both human health and the condition of the environment) Resource depletion, such as energy, fresh water , natural resources or land Impact to the environment via greenhouse gasses, ozone layer depletion, Abiotic - non- living factors such as sunlight, humidity, temperature, wind, water Edaphic - The nature of the soil and the group, such as the geology of the land and soil type, land use or water resource Introduction to the Life-Cycle Assessment with SimaPro SimaPro is a life-cycle assessment software LCA calculates the contribution of each life cycle stage to the overall environment load Identifies environmental hot spots in the life cycle of a product or business process It supports life cycle management and decision making Facilitates the comparison of products Life cycle assessment is an iterative process The beginning of LCA, first developed by The Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) in the early 1990s LCA has four steps 1) Define the goal and scope 2) Compile an inventory of environment burdens : Energy, Materials and Waste at each life-cycle stage. 3) Determine the impacts of the inventories on the environment and human health 4) Interpret the results and implement opportunities for improvement The phases of an LCA includes 1) Define goal and scope 2) Inventory analysis 3) Impact assessment 4) Interpretation Beyond sustainability ( Social impacts ) 1) LCA helps assess the impact on various stakeholders over the entire life-cycle of the product 2) Assess its various social impacts 3) The UNEP SETAC Guidelines for Social Life-cycle of Products is the only one that is based on product life-cycle thinking. 4) The other three in the PRèdocument are at company-level. - Beyond sustainability (Economic) 1) Touches and highlight the cost and revenue 2) Companies are struggling to obtain accurate sales margins, exchange rates, market prices, so do not expect too much 3) Challenges such as research, investments, marketing and overheads are usually under-represented in any LCA model -Since LCA is not time-bound, how to model interest or discount rates? 4) The jury is still out on economic sustainability - Standards for LCA The leading standards are 1) ISO 14040 Principles and Framework 2) ISO 14044 Requirements and Guidelines The ISO standards mandate documenting the goal and scope of the LCA, including the interpretation of results and peer review by independent experts. For the first step of LCA, defining the goal & scope, explain what it means 1) An LCA models a product, service or system. 2) The goals and scope of an LCA study are determined by considering - The reason for executing the LCA - A precise definition of the product, its function and its life cycle (describing the application) - A precise definition of the functional unit (Especially when the product are to be compared) - a description of the system boundaries - data and data quality assumptions and limitations - The intended audiences and the way the results will be communicated 1) Describing the reasons for carrying out the study clearly 2) Describe clearly the application and intended audiences 3) State if the results are to be used internally or externally 4) When comparing 2 products, ISO mandates that weights may not be used in impact assessment and peer review is mandatory Initial system boundaries - product systems are interrelated in complex way thus not all inputs and outputs can be traced explicitly, so boundaries must be defined the production and disposal of capital goods. There are three levels for capital goods: 1: include only the production of materials and transport (rarely in LCA) 2: include all life-cycle processes, but not capital goods. 3: include all life-cycle processes capital goods. - The inventory step is the most demanding task in performing an LCA because of data collection there are 2 types of data : 1) Foreground : Specific data that decribes a product 2) Background : Data for the production of generic materials , energy, transport and waste management that can be found inn databases Foreground data is 1) often collected through questionnaires from data providers 2) Be mindful of confidentiality issues - use average values only 3) Be mindful of terminology as it varies from industry to industry Background data 1) Two important sources for such data: The ecoinvent life cycle inventory (LCI) v3 database. Input-output databases by sector, e.g. agricultural, banking, transport. 2) Internet sites