In this article, we will give you an overview of the most popular LCA tools. Some are focused on specific industries, while others can be used in many different industries. Some still share the academic background of LCA, yet others have been developed to help businesses measure their environmental footprint. Today, there are many different LCA tools available. With sustainability, climate change and the circular economy being more publicly debated topics, the market for LCA tools itself has also developed. Life Cycle Assessment tools have been around since the 1990s. Life Cycle Assessment Software: From academic to business solution Even today, many tools that help calculate Life Cycle Assessments have strong ties to the academic field. The first LCA tools were developed within universities. It’s no surprise that most LCA tools share this background. Nevertheless, LCA is something you will need to pay greater attention to if you want to leverage that information into a market and/or nonmarket strategy.Historically, a Life Cycle Assessment was primarily used for research purposes. LCIA Methods: Impact Assessment Methods in Life Cycle Analysis.īy no means can we begin to cover the entire range of LCA in this course. A very good introduction to what is covered in the LCIA can be found here.
LCIAs, or Life Cycle Impact Assessments, are an emerging category of LCA that tries to focus on all impacts of a specific product, production chain, energy source, etc. LCAs are important to many companies, because LCAs can support their claims of being "sustainably sourced." As such, LCAs are becoming the only way companies can even plan to produce a sustainable design requiring any complex supply chain. The overall trend in design for industrial sustainability, particularly in European countries, has been to further increase the goals and scope of an LCA to be as inclusive as possible of every and all components of a process or a product.
If you are curious and would like to give LCA a try, I recommend playing around with the OpenLCA platform, which is free and open-source.
We will not be engaging with the software in this course, but you need to learn how to read a life-cycle assessment report and understand what it means to make a decision based on those reports. These software packages allow you to trace every energy, material, and even social input that it takes to bring a product from raw materials to all the way to the end of its functional life, when it is either recycled or dumped.
There are a wide variety of professional software packages (GaBi, SimaPro, Quantis Suite, Sustainable Minds, OpenLCA, etc.) that allow for the analysis of a product's entire life cycle.
The most recent version of the ISO LCA is ISO 14040:2006, which was last updated in 2010. This is probably the best overview of an LCA approach available: 1997 Environmental management-life cycle assessment-principles and framework (ISO/FDIS 14040), ISO TC 207. The LCA framework was standardized in 1997 by the ISO (1997) International organization of standardization and is part of the wider set of ISO 14000 Environmental Standards. Conclusions and recommended courses of action.Identification of issues based on results.Occur at multiple stages throughout the scope of the project, such as at the collection of new information. INTERPRETATIONS: Follow a systematic method for evaluating, checking, quantifying, and identifying data/information collected from the Goals & Scope, Inventory Analysis, and Impact Assessments. measurement of indicators, inventory flow, normalizations.