Marco Recchioni

Rethinking the Area of Protection “Natural Resources” in Life Cycle Assessment

Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) in classical life cycle assessment (LCA) aims at analyzing potential impacts of products and services typically on three so-called areas of protection (AoPs): Natural Environment, Human Health, and Natural Resources. This paper proposes an elaboration of the AoP Natural Resources. It starts with analyzing different perspectives on Natural Resources as they are somehow sandwiched in between the Natural Environment (their cradle) and the human-industrial environment (their application). Reflecting different viewpoints, five perspectives are developed with the suggestion to select three in function of classical LCA. They result in three safeguard subjects: the Asset of Natural Resources, their Provisioning Capacity, and their role in Global Functions. Whereas the Provisioning Capacity is fully in function of humans, the global functions go beyond provisioning as they include nonprovisioning functions for humans and regulating and maintenance services for the globe as a whole, following the ecosystem services framework. A fourth and fifth safeguard subject has been identified: recognizing the role Natural Resources for human welfare, either specifically as building block in supply chains of products and services as such, either with or without their functions beyond provisioning. But as these are far broader as they in principle should include characterization of mechanisms within the human industrial society, they are considered as subjects for an integrated sustainability assessment (LCSA: life cycle sustainability assessment), that is, incorporating social, economic and environmental issues.

Combining five criteria to identify relevant products measures for resource efficiency of an energy using product

Product recovery at end-of-life (EoL), initially focusing on the reduction of residual (hazardous) waste, is currently being enlarged and now link with emerging issues such as “resource efficiency” and “use and management of Critical Raw Materials”. However, for many environmental aspects, product’s measures considered by current policies and industry practices are not always consistent, nor optimized. It can be concluded that there is currently no systematic and consistent integration of EoL and resource efficiency measures in product design practices and in product policies and this should be improved. The paper proposes a new integrated method to assess the resource efficiency performances of products and to derive relevant product’s measures for improvement. The assessment is based on five different criteria: reusability/recyclability/recoverability - RRR - (per mass and per environmental impacts); recycled content (per mass and per environmental impact); use and management of hazardous substances. The paper briefly describes the assessments methods proposed for each of these criteria. The methods are based on existing literature and technical documents, and have been adapted to this particular aim. The proposed method is presented and discussed on the basis of a Energy using Product (EuP) case-study: a LCD-TV.

Challenges and opportunities for web-shared publication of quality-assured life cycle data: the contributions of the Life Cycle Data Network

PurposeThe European Commission’s Integrated Product Policy Communication, 2003, defined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as the ‘best framework for assessing the potential environmental impacts of products’. Since then, the use of LCA and life cycle approaches has been developing in a wide range of European policies, and its use has also significantly grown in business. Increasing the availability of quality-assured Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data is the current challenge to ensure the development of LCA in various areas.MethodsOne solution to increase availability is to use LCI data from multiple database sources but under the condition that such LCI data are fully interoperable.Results and discussionThis paper presents original solutions and recent achievements towards increased availability, quality and interoperability of life cycle inventory data, developed through European Commission-led activities and based on wide stakeholder consultation and international dialogue. An overview of related activities, such as the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD), the European Reference Life Cycle Database (ELCD) and the ILCD Entry-Level quality requirements are presented. The focus is then on the Life Cycle Data Network (LCDN).ConclusionsA non-centralised data network of LCI datasets complying with minimum quality requirements that was politically launched in February 2014, already includes several database nodes from different worldwide sources and has the potential to contribute to the needs of the international community.

Background qualitative analysis of the European Reference Life Cycle Database (ELCD) energy datasets – Part I: Fuel datasets

The aim of this paper is to identify areas of potential improvement of the European Reference Life Cycle Database (ELCD) electricity datasets. The revision is based on the data quality indicators described by the International Life Cycle Data system (ILCD) Handbook, applied on sectorial basis. These indicators evaluate the technological, geographical and time-related representativeness of the dataset and the appropriateness in terms of completeness, precision and methodology. Results show that ELCD electricity datasets have a very good quality in general terms, nevertheless some findings and recommendations in order to improve the quality of Life-Cycle Inventories have been derived. Moreover, these results ensure the quality of the electricity-related datasets to any LCA practitioner, and provide insights related to the limitations and assumptions underlying in the datasets modelling. Giving this information, the LCA practitioner will be able to decide whether the use of the ELCD electricity datasets is appropriate based on the goal and scope of the analysis to be conducted. The methodological approach would be also useful for dataset developers and reviewers, in order to improve the overall Data Quality Requirements of databases.