life cycle assessment Articles
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Estimating the Value of Life Cycle Assessments
Untitled Document Abstract What is a life cycle assessment worth? How much should one spend on an LCA, and what are the expected returns from undertaking one? The value of an LCA ought to be readily estimable by anyone proposing to fund an LCA, or by anyone seeking funds for undertaking an LCA. Assessing the value of a potential LCA as a function of its uncertainty and scope and ...
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Life Cycle Assessment, Databases and Sustainable Building
Untitled Document We are experiencing a fundamental change that affects how products are developed and, more importantly, how they are perceived, especially by large volume purchasers such as governments and members of extended supply chains. The change affects market shares, and it most certainly affects building material choices and design decisions. I’m referring ...
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Book Review: Improvement of the Life Cycle Assessment Methodology for Dwellings by Arjen Meijer
Improvement of the Life Cycle Assessment Methodology for Dwellings, by Arjen Meijer. Amsterdam, IOS Press, 2006. ISBN: 9781586036904Keywords: book ...
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Life cycle assessment of film and digital imaging product system scenarios
With the advent of digital imaging technology, the options available in consumer imaging have increased. However, the relative environmental impacts of these different options are not clear cut. Assessment of the impacts of these options can help to provide feedback to decision makers and give insight that will help reduce environmental impact through product system design. In this paper, we ...
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Life cycle assessment in the framework of sustainable tourism: a preliminary examination of its effectiveness and challenges
The environmental sustainability of tourism has been increasingly appearing in Local Agenda 21 and in the development policies of many countries. Although several studies have focused on sustainable tourism, only a few of them are based on life cycle assessment (LCA), the main methodology to assess environmental issues from a life cycle perspective. In order to gain a better understanding of the ...
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Exergy–based model for quantifying land resource in China: a case study of sintered brick
Land use and resource depletion are two main considerations in life cycle assessment (LCA). Unfortunately, the relationship between land use and resource depletion is always ignored and only a few studies tried to connect them. The objective of this paper is to establish an exergy–based model for quantifying land resource in China, which includes both the occupation phase and the renaturalisation ...
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Life cycle assessment in market, research, and policy: Harmonization beyond standardization
This article introduces the special series “LCA in Market Research and Policy: Harmonization beyond standardization,” which was generated from the 19th SETAC Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Case Study Symposium held November 2013, in Rome, Italy. This collection of invited articles reflects the purpose of symposium and focuses on how LCA can support the decision‐making process at all levels (i.e., ...
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A framework for energy use indicators and their reporting in life cycle assessment
Energy use is a common impact category in life cycle assessment (LCA). Many different energy use indicators are used in LCA studies, accounting for energy use in different ways. Often, however, the choice of the energy use indicator applied is poorly described and motivated. To contribute to a more purposeful selection of energy use indicators and to ensure consistent and transparent reporting ...
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Cleaner production and life cycle design of upholstered furniture
This article presents some results of the environmental and organisational aspects that were obtained from a preliminary analysis of the process of manufacturing upholstered furniture at the furniture cluster in the State of Alagoas, Brazil. The method is based on the concepts of pollution prevention and cleaner production that are associated to the concept of product life cycle design. Data were ...
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Life cycle engineering: methods, databases and results
The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique and of existing methods and databases. LCA is a technique to assess the potential environmental impact associated with a product or a service throughout its life cycle from raw material acquisition through production, use and disposal. The International ISO Standards provide principles, framework and ...
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Life cycle assessment of integrated circuit packaging technologies.
Background, aim and scope Nanostructured polymer particles are produced to be used in ball grid array (BGA) and chip scale packaging (CSP). The technology could replace conventional BGA and CSP metal balls, and the hypothesis is that the shift could be eco-efficient as polymer core particles increase the reliability. For the first time, these particles are environmentally evaluated.Materials and ...
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VerdEE: a tool for adoption of life cycle assessment in small and medium sized enterprises in Italy
The Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment (ENEA) carried out a project focused on identifying the main difficulties and problems of the introduction of the life cycle concept in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and also on overcoming these difficulties. A new tool, VerdEE, was developed to evaluate the environmental profile of a product based on a ...
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Simplified environmental impact drivers for product life cycle
The early design stage of product development often has limited information available to designers. The environmental impacts of a products life cycle are widely assessed using life cycle assessment (LCA). Nevertheless, as LCA is a costly and time-consuming method, the previous study shown the development of simplified LCA (SLCA) drivers of the entire product life cycle stages for the conceptual ...
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Life Cycle Assessment applications in the building sector
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool has been developed to evaluate environmental impacts of building projects, from construction until demolition. The operation phase is essential, particularly energy processes: therefore LCA is linked to thermal simulation. Several alternatives can be studied. The results, in the form of environmental indicators (e.g., energy and water consumption, contribution ...
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Exhausting lifetime by multitiered reuse with forced circulation in closed-loop manufacturing
In closed-loop manufacturing, the reuse option is adopted to reduce the environmental load by exhausting the lifetimes of products and parts. There are two reasons why the reuse is effective. They are different frequencies of usage of products by users and different lifetimes of parts composing the product. It is, therefore, necessary to make use of these differences properly for effective ...
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How to measure social impacts? A socio-eco-efficiency analysis by the SEEBALANCE® method
BASF has, in cooperation with Karlsruhe University, Jena University and the Oko-Institut e.V. (Germany), developed a socio-eco-efficiency analysis – the so-called SEEBALANCE®. The objective was the integration of quantified social indicators into the BASF eco-efficiency analysis. Many life cycle analyses do not include an assessment of social impacts and effects. However, in order to arrive at a ...
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E-commerce and the environment: a gateway to the renewal of greening supply chains
Electronic commerce is expected to influence a wide range of supply chain systems and thus lead to unidentified environmental impacts. Current studies discussing the impacts have a problem that they arrive at conflicting results or ungeneralisable works. This article addresses the issue of methodology and proposes an assessment model for the resolution of this problem. In the meantime, this ...
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Physical Impacts of Land Use in Product Life Cycle Assessment
Untitled Document Introduction This is the final report from the sub-project “Quantitative environmental assessment of land use in relation to the product life cycle” of the EUREKA project EU-1296 entitled “Development and application of major missing elements in the existing detailed Life Cycle Assessment methodology (LCAGAPS),” which was funded by the Danish EUREKAsecretariat ...
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Supporting development of modular products utilising simplified LCA and fuzzy logic
The application of life cycle assessment (LCA) is usually aimed at products where most parameters relating to architecture, processes and materials are defined and known. However, application of conventional LCA for products or services that are incomplete in their specification is quite difficult or even impossible, if too many significant parameters are unknown. In our previous work targeting ...
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Regular application of LCA in industrial practice
The methodology of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has proved to be suitable to support industrial decision making in several case studies. Nevertheless, the regular application of LCA in industrial practice is still uncommon. The major reason for this is constituted by the extensive demand of Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data from the product life cycle, which is needed for the regular execution of ...
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