What is LCA
Life Cycle Assessment (below LCA) is method of comparison of environmental impacts of products, technologies or services with a view to their whole life cycle, so called from cradle to grave. The emissions to all components of environment during product production, use and disposal are considered. Processes of raw material mining, material and energy production, additional processes or subprocesses are also involved.
LCA method has fixed structure and is practiced according to international standards ISO 14040. For the effective elaboration of LCA studies are used commercially available databases of processes and material and energy flows (see Tools).
The LCA method is one of the most important information tools of environmentally oriented product policy. Within the meaning of EN ISO 14040 LCA method can be defined as compilation and evaluation of the inputs, outputs and the potential environmental impacts of a product system throughout its life cycle.
LCA method consists of 4 main phases:
1. goal and scope definition
2. inventory analysis
3. impact assessment
4. interpretation
Schema: Stages of an LCA according EN ISO 14040
Zdroj: EN ISO 14 040
Add 1: Goal and scope aims to definition how big part of product life cycle will be taken in assessment and to what will assessment be serving. The criteria serving to system comparison and specific time horizon are described in this step.
Add 2: The part of inventory analysis is description of material and energy flows within the product system and especially its interaction with environment, consumed raw materials and emissions to the environment. All important processes and subsidiary energy and material flows are described here.
Add 3: Details from inventory analysis serve for impact assessment. The indicator results of all impact categories are counted here; the importance of every impact category is assessed by normalization and eventually also by weighting. The result of impact assessment is table summary of all impacts.
Add 4: Interpretation of life cycle involve critical review, determination of data sensitivity and result presentation.
The LCA method can be applied in next applications:
- strategic planning and decision making,
- product development (ecodesign),
- alternative comparison for purpose of decision making in investment,
- ecolabelling,
- policy and regulations.
The utilization of LCA method can help to:
- searching the most available life cycles, e.g. those with minimal negative impact on environment,
- assuming the decisions in industry, public organizations or NGOs, which determinate direction and priorities in strategic planning, design or design product or process change,
- choice of important indicators of environmental behavior of organization including measurement and assessing techniques, mainly in connection with the assessment of state of its environmental improving,
- marketing with the link on formulation of environmental declaration or ecolabelling (in declaration accepted on the conference Eco-labelling for a Sustainable Future in Berlin 1998 was adopted the recommendation to use LCA method in ecolabelling programmes especially from the reason that by this is possible to discover the causes of negative impacts on environment and by their disposal is possible to increase the effectivity and preventive activity of ecolabelling programmes).