Life Cycle Assessment

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Life Cycle Assessment Life Cycle Costing

• Lecture 9a

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What are they?

• Techniques or methodologies for analyzing the
  impacts of a specific activity or action
• Life Cycle Analysis
• Life Cycle Costing
• Decision Systems
• Emergy Analysis

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Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA)

• An evolving, multidisciplinary tool for measuring
  environmental performance
• A cradle-to-grave systems approach for
  understanding the environmental consequences of
  technology choices
• Concept all stages of the life of a material
  generate environmental impacts raw materials
  extraction, procesing, intermediate materials
  manufacture, product manufacture, installation,
  operation and maintenance, removal, recycling,
  reuse, or disposal

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General Materials Flow for Cradle-to-Grave
Analysis of a Product System
Reuse
Product Recycling
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General LCA Methodology
I. Goal Identification and Scoping What is the
purpose of the LCA? What decision is the LCA
meant to support? Where are the environmental
impact boundaries to be drawn? Are all impacts,
secondary, tertiary included? II. Four-Step LCA
Analytic Process 1. Inventory Analysis
environmental inputs 2. Impact Assessment 3.
Impact Evaluation 4. Improvement Assessment Step
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1. Inventory Analysis

• Identify and quantify all environmental inputs
  and outputs over the life cycle
• Inputs energy, water, other resources
• Outputs Emissions and releases to air ,water,
  land
• Includes uncertainty ranges

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2. Impact Assessment

• Classify inventory items by impact greenhouse
  warming gases, ozone depletion, soil erosion,
  biodiversity, human health, natural resource
• Data converted to equivalency factors and impact
  per functional unit of material
• Greenhouse warming Halogenated compounds gt CH4 gt
  CO2
• CO2 equivalents per square meter
• Allow direct numerical comparisons between
  materials

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3. Impact Assessment

• Impact assessment results are normalize into an
  overall environmental score for each alternative
• Result relative environmental scores for each
  alternative that can be ranked

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4. Improvement Assessment

• Review the results to determine key impacts
• Evaluate process alternatives to reduce impacts
• Consider Design of the Environment and Industrial
  Ecology approaches

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SETAC

• Society for Environmental Toxicology and
  Chemistry
• Standardized LCA approach
• International society dedicated to LCA

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Example Cloth vs. Disposable Diapers

• LCA of the comparative environmental impacts of
  using cloth or disposable diapers
• Single use, home-laundered, commercial service
• Resource and environmental profile analysis
  (REPA)
• Assessed at each stage
• Energy consumption
• Water usage
• Atmospheric and waterborne emissions
• Solid waste

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Life Cycle Cost (LCC) Analysis

• Financial analysis of alternatives
• Uses
• determine the most financially viable alternative
• demonstrate a sustainable alternative is viable
• Can be applied to simple or complex problems
• Problem selection of the discount rate

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