Early Life Cycle Assessment Books Laid the Foundation for Modern-Day LCA
Jim Fava, Anthesis Group, and Bruce Vigon, Breveja Environmental Consulting LLC
In the late 1980s, SETAC applied their SETAC Pellston Workshops® approach to understand and develop key methodological principles and frameworks to identify the environmental impacts associated with products, from the acquisition of raw materials to end-of-life management (e.g., landfill, recycling, incineration).
Governments and businesses began to shift their focus from the manufacturing processes to the products themselves. They started to question the amount of energy used in manufacturing and transport, the implications of greenhouse gases released during the use stage, the impacts from the use of natural resources, and the disposal of solid waste produced. Additionally, as consumers became more socially conscious and aware of the environmental impacts associated with products they purchased, companies began using an early vision of life cycle assessment (LCA) to make claims that their products were better than competing products. However, despite their claims, there was no proven and accepted methodology to conduct such analyses.
Earlier successes to reach clarity and consensus on ecological risk assessment methodological topics through SETAC Pellston Workshops lent SETAC to become the logical sponsoring organization to tackle the need to develop the scientific conceptual and technical foundation for LCA.
Several key SETAC LCA workshops provided these frameworks for life cycle assessment. Using the workshop books, SETAC continued work to advance LCA in partnership and collaboration from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, UN Environment Programme–SETAC Life Cycle Initiative, and many other countries and organizations globally. The output from those initial foundational meetings culminated in the publication of several books, including:
- Technical Framework for Life-Cycle Assessment
- A Conceptual Framework for Life-Cycle Impact Assessment
- Life-Cycle Assessment Data Quality: A Conceptual Framework
- Guidelines for Life-Cycle Assessment: A “Code of Practice”
SETAC, with support from Jim Fava at Anthesis Group, has recently digitized and made free all the LCA books referenced above and others. We have highlighted several key points from each of these foundational books below.
Technical Framework for Life-Cycle Assessment
James Fava, Richard Denison, Bruce Jones, Mary Ann Curran, Bruce Vigon, Susan Selke, James Barnum
This book develops and describes the technical framework for life cycle assessment. Using the SETAC Pellston Workshops approach, nearly 50 experts from Europe and North America, representing business, government, university and NGOs, came together to leverage current thinking, practice and desires to the technical framework for LCA. LCA is a powerful tool for helping reduce the environmental burdens associated with a product, process or activity. One of the major findings of the workshop was the consensus that complete life cycle assessments should be composed of three separate but interrelated components: life-cycle inventory, life cycle impact analysis and life cycle improvement analysis. Using the multi-stakeholder representation, there was a solid consensus to use LCA results to drive change and product improvements. Creation of this structure was an advancement over then current thinking in several ways, most notably moving the methodology beyond simple inventories of material and energy flows. The idea that physical properties, like raw material inputs, could be related to a range of potential impacts allow product improvements to be based on more than a “less is better” construct.
A Conceptual Framework for Life-Cycle Impact Assessment
James Fava, Frank Consoli, Richard Denison, Kenneth Dickson, Tim Mohin, Bruce Vigon
The outcome of the workshop held in February 1992 reinforced the importance of moving beyond a mass-balance inventory approach to align on how impact assessments could be applied to LCAs and assessed the overall need for developing feasible impact assessment methods for LCAs. Key advancements included the development of “characterization factors” as modifiers of physical flows to create a set of indicators for potential adverse consequences across multiple impact categories. This has remained at the core of connecting product attributes to environmental implications today.
Life-Cycle Assessment Data Quality: A Conceptual Framework
James Fava, Allan A. Jensen, Lars Lindfors, Steven Pomper, Bea De Smet, John Warren, Bruce Vigon
As the number of LCA studies increased, researchers began questioning “data quality;” however, there was no data quality assessment methodology for LCAs. SETAC sponsored a workshop to address this gap and the role of data quality in LCAs. Specifically, the workshop addressed current practices for measuring data quality, problems with data gaps, lack of data quality indicators (DQIs) and possible sources of data variability. The relationship between data quality indicators that specify how good data are and data quality objectives (DQO) that state how good data need to be for suitability in a given assessment were a key outcome of the workshop. A further result was the contribution to future meta-data fields embedded in public or commercial databases supporting data sharing globally among practitioners.
Guidelines for Life-Cycle Assessment: A “Code of Practice”
Frank Consoli, David Allen, Ian Boustead, James Fava, William Franklin, Allan A. Jensen, Nick de Oude, Rod Parrish, Rod Perriman, Dennis Postlethwaite, Beth Quay, Jacinthe Séguin, Bruce Vigon
The “Code of Practice” lays out general principles and a framework for the conduct, review, presentation and use of LCA findings with the best available information as of 1993. It was intended as guidance for all individuals who commissioned, carried-out, reviewed or used the results of an LCA, and to enhance the quality, transparency and credibility of such studies.
Over the last 30 years, LCA has filled a need to be able to examine the environmental impacts of a product, packaging and material over their entire life cycle – raw materials acquisition to end-of-life disposition (e.g., recycling, reuse, landfill). LCA is one of the tools used to examine the environmental life cycle consequences of making and using products or providing services. While knowledge of and consensus on the practice of LCAs has evolved, and the newer publications reflect current scientific thinking and practical experience on the subject, the foundational frameworks developed by SETAC Pellston Workshops hold fast. For example, the Goal and Scope Definition (G&SD) phase was added as a result of these core LCA workshops. The G&SD phase defines the study’s basic requirements and expectations (e.g., purpose, functional unit, boundary conditions, data quality, impacts and methodology, and intended applications).
When we examine current issues, such as circular economy, plastics in the marine environment and climate change, we may be experiencing a similar situation to solid waste in the 1980s, where the focus was often on a single impact at one life cycle stage. LCA is an excellent tool to examine hot spots (over multiple life cycle stages and impacts) and identify opportunities for solutions. Furthermore, the SETAC Pellston Workshops approach could be applied in a multi-stakeholder, international solutions to these current societal problems – resulting in positive sustainability and business value actionable outcomes.
We will be reaching out over the next several months to provide additional information and materials about LCA on the SETAC website. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Jim Fava at [email protected].
Authors’ contact information: [email protected] and [email protected]