ISO standard

Session 5 24th of October 2019

LCA & Eco-design uni.lu

Gregor Waltersdorfer
Summary of Session 4
• Special flows: economic f., environmental f.,
reference f.
• 2 methods for calculating the inventory (LCI):
• Sequential method
• Matrix method
• Both have their advantages:
• Sequential: if no square matrix can be set up
• Matrix: if recursive processes are involved.
Reflection on the exercises of
session 4
• Simple exercise:
• Energy conversion between input and output
• Moderate exercise:
• Some unit processes had multiple in- or outputs
• material balance for all unit processes’ inputs and
outputs
• Rule of three / Thales’ theorem
 Simple exercise: solution
50 l crude oil

10 kg CO2
Production of fuel
2 kg SO2

100 l fuel
2 l fuel

0.1 kg SO2
Production of
electricity
1 kg CO2

10 kWh
electricity
Today’s agenda
• ISO standard for LCA
• Introduction
• Functional unit
• Goal and scope
• Cut-off
• Allocation
• Exercise on goal and scope definition
Environmental assessment tools
• Environmental focus: impacts of a
• Site (industrial plant, roads): environmental impact
assessment: required by law; no prescribed focus of
environmental impacts
• Company: environmental auditing (ISO 14001)
• Product: LCA, MIPS, ecological/carbon/water footprint
• Economic focus:
• Cost-benefit analysis;
• Life cycle costing (for buildings: ISO 15686-5)
• Material flow cost accounting (ISO 14051)
• Environmental full-cost accounting
History of LCA
• 1969: first LCA study: for Coca-Cola on packaging.
• 1970s: Oil crisis -> energy debate
• 1980s:
• landfill space became scarce in some countries
• Dominant paradigm about emissions: how much water, air needed
to dilute emissions to harmless
• 1990s: call for LCA standardization; first conferences on LCA;
• 1991: name: LCA
• 1997-2000: ISO 14040 - 14043;
• Environmental protection: should go beyond “end-of-pipe”
• Databases were developed -> hopes for LCA in product
development
• 2002: ISO 14048: LCI database standard
ISO’s LCA framework
Goal & Scope (of a LCA study)
states: includes:
• Intended application / • The product system
purpose (formulated as • The functional unit
question)
• Reasons for carrying out • The type of LCA study
the study • The system boundary
• Intended audience (to • Allocation procedure
whom the results are • Impact categories
intended to be selected
communicated)
• Data quality
• Whether results contain requirements: relevant,
product comparisons, reliable, accessible
which will be disclosed to
the public. • Type of critical review
(internal, external)
Types of LCA
Time-perspective:
• Accounting type (attributional)
• retrospective: looking into the past
• for developing eco-labels, procurement, marketing (e.g.: what
environmental impacts a product may be responsible for)
• Change-oriented (consequential)
• prospective: about decisions for improvements
• for product development, production process design,
environmental policy making e.g. on recycling schemes

Number of products:
• Stand-alone: a single product
• Comparative: 2 or more products
Examples of purposes (as question)
1. Where are the improvement possibilities in the life
cycle of this product?
2. Which are the activities in the life cycle that
contribute the most to the environmental impact
associated with this product?
3. What would be the environmental consequences of
changing certain processes in the life cycle in such
and such a way?
4. What would be the environmental consequences of
using a secondary recycled raw material for this
product, instead if the virgin material presently used?
5. What is the environmentally preferable choice of
products A, B and C used in application X?
Reasons for carrying out LCA studies
Reasons Areas
Decision making • Product design and development
• Purchasing
• Support for regulatory measures and policy
instruments

Learning & exploration • Characterization of production systems

• Identification of improvement possibilities
• Selection of environmental performance indicators

Communication • LCA-based eco-labelling

• Environmental product declarations
• benchmarking
Functional unit
• Functional unit = quantification of the function or
performance of the studied product system(s)
• To allow for comparisons (between life cycle phases or between
product systems)
• To provide a reference to which all in- & outputs are related: ->
reference flow
• In matrix calculations: final demand vector contains this reference
flow

• Problem: a product’s performance can be measured in

many ways:
• e.g. wood or concrete floor construction: differences in load
capacity and noise reduction
• e.g. car: 1) transportation; 2) safety;
• -> Important to define minimum level of quality (e.g. a car’s safety
standard)
 Functional unit: exercise
Product / Service Functional unit Alternative ways of providing
functions
Soft drink distribution x liter in a particular size of Soda stream, juice powder
packaging; kcal
Light bulb year and lumen Candles; bottle bulb light
Recycling of discarded kg cardboard Incineration, re-use
cardboard as furniture
packaging
Wall paper; wall paint m² and year Furniture covering the wall
Passenger transportation person and km Video conferencing
Truck m³ and km; ton and km Drones
Washing machine kg of clean clothes Dry cleaning, laundromat
Shoes Year of protected feet of a Inline skates
particular size, km walking
Bread kcal or gram of daily serving Other sources of carbohydrates
Scope of an LCA study: decisions on
• Product systems (and alternatives)
• Initial flow chart of the life cycle (general enough to cover all
alternatives)
• Functional unit: e.g. person x km; kg of clean laundry
• Impact categories: meta-categories: ecological damage, human health
damage, resource depletion.
• Method for impact assessment: no impact assessment: interpret LCI
data directly and stop afterwards, or: characterization only, or also
weighting.
• Type of LCA study: stand-alone, attributional, consequential
• System boundaries: of natural systems, geographical b., time b., of
technical systems (cut-off, or allocation)
• Principles for allocation
• Data quality requirements: relevant, reliable, accessible
• average data: e.g.: Swedish electricity mix: ~50% nuclear, ~50% hydro, <5%
fossil;
• marginal data: e.g.: Sweden: 100% fossil
Data collection
• Numerical data on
• Inputs: raw material, energy, ancillary input, other physical input (e.g. land use)
• Output: products and by-products
• Emissions: to air, water, land: e.g.: material, light, noise,…
• Descriptive data:
• Transport: distances, routing -> used for generic data of different modes
• Description of the technology, how and when measurement were made, geographical
location, origin and destination of flows, related system boundary of data, age of data.
• Data sources:
• Upstream: a company’s suppliers, and the suppliers’ suppliers,…
• Downstream: statistics (averages) of consumer behavior; waste management companies
• LCI databases, other LCA studies
• Model calculations
• Experts
• Estimates and assumptions
• Validity check: (required by ISO): by comparison to other data; mass or energy
balances. Also check against data quality requirements
System boundaries
• Of technical system
• Where is a product’s cradle, where its grave?
• Cradle: easy for non-renewables; difficult for renewables: e.g. soil: is it nature
or part of a technical production system?
• Grave: easy for waste treatment; difficult for landfills, because of its emissions
(leachate: part of inventory analysis) and degradation processes (entering
natural system).
• Activities under human control = technical system
• Boundary between technical & natural system = boundary between
inventory analysis and impact assessment
• Geography
• an important factor, due to variations between countries (e.g. energy
mix) and sensitivity of the environment to pollutants
• Origin of raw materials can be unknown
• Time horizon
• Consequential LCA: how long does the change take effect?
• Attributional LCA: is data up-to-date?
System boundaries (contd.)
• Cut-off (capital goods, personnel): what to include or
exclude?
• Consequential LCA: affected by change?
• Criteria: negligible, relevant, analyzable with given resources
(time, money)
• Cradle-to-grave, or to-gate
• Boundaries to other technical systems: three basic cases
facing the allocation problem:
• multi-output processes (e.g. refinery)
• multi-input (e.g. landfill)
• open loop recycling: recycling into a different product, usually
with lower quality (e.g. steel scrap into reinforcement bars)
• System subdivision:
• Different types of data (e.g. marginal vs average data) used to
model foreground and background system.
Considering “cut-off” in matrices
Removing cut-off flows from the
technology matrix -> split it into a
"solvable" part A' and an "unsolvable"
part A". Thus, also the final demand Production of
vector has two parts. generators

Due to the cut-off, a discrepancy (d) 1 generator

arises between the imposed and the Cut-off line
obtained final demand vectors:
𝑨′ 𝑨′
𝑑ҧ = 𝑠ҧ − 𝑠ҧ Production of
𝑨′′ 0
electricity
Better idea is to avoid cut-off by
estimating missing flows with economic
input-output analysis.
1 kWh
Allocation
Problem
• A process with multiple products
Municipal
solid waste environmental load

toxics
Incineration plant emissions
ash

heat electricity

• How does a fair distribution of the environmental

load among the 2 products look like?
Problem occurs in multifunctional
processes and recycling
Another example:

Barley
System expansion Partitioning
15% of mass

85% of mass
Dealing with the allocation problem
Order of possible procedures:
1. Avoiding allocation whenever possible by:
a. Increasing the level of detail of the system (-> e.g. identifying
b. Expanding the system
2. Partitioning based on physical relationships (e.g.: mass, exergy)
3. Partitioning based on other relationships, such as economic
value.

Two principles:
1. 100% rule: sum of environmental loads: allocated equals
unallocated
2. Sensitivity analysis in case of several possible allocation
procedures
Example for cascade of wood
Allocation in open loop recycling
(cascading use) virgin recycling recycling

e.g.: PET bottle -> textile -> fuel production production production
use of use of
use of fuel
bottle textile

waste

Allocation options (If system expansion is not possible):

• For attributional LCAs
• Cut-off: allocation based on direct cause
• In relation to relative quality (e.g. 60% - 30% - 10%)
• Waste as inevitable consequence of problematic raw material
extraction -> waste allocated to first product.
• Raw material extraction as inevitable consequence if waste not fully
recycled -> virgin resource extraction allocated to last product.
• For consequential LCAs
• Approximation with closed loop recycling -> equally allocated to all
• 50/50-method: virgin material and waste treatment are allocated
equally to first and last product.
Considering allocation in the
matrix calculation method

• 2 ways to add a column in the technology matrix

• System expansion: including a flow of another system
with equal function
• It is assumed that the environmental load of this flow is
avoided, and so it is credited.
• Partitioning: splitting the multifunctional process into a
number of independent monofunctional processes (with
the help of coefficients/allocation factors).
Exercise on goal and
scope definition
Newsprint & newspaper production
Video about the newsprint
production process
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WXoaONFUT
A
Technical background on
newsprint
• Newsprint is produced from virgin thermo-mechanical
pulp (TMP) only, or in a mixture with recycled fibers
from newspapers.
• TMP is produced by grinding wood chips in refiners
with high electricity consumption.
• For the recycling of fibers, old newspaper is dissolved in
water for de-inking.
• Pulp and newsprint are produced in the same plant ->
no drying in between, but only at the end (with steam).
• The newsprint is then transported to a newspaper
printing house.
Instructions

Newsprint

• LCA Study 1: by a national authority identifying the

process with the highest environmental impact in
the life cycle of newspaper in the country.
• LCA Study 2: by a newsprint producer exploring
changes due to recycling of newspaper.
Instructions (contd.)
Purpose:
• Study 1: Where are the highest environmental impacts in the life cycle of
newspaper in the country?
• Study 2: What would be the environmental consequences of increasing the
amount of recycled fiber (newspaper) in the newsprint production?
Task: define the following items, and motivate your choices:
• Reasons for carrying out the study
• Intended audience
• The product systems
• The functional unit
• The type of LCA study
• The system boundary: what technical systems need to be included?
• The whole life cycle or
• Specific systems and processes
• Required data:
• average or marginal or both
• Site specific, national, international
 Study 1: national authority: Study 2: newsprint producer:
highest env. impact: where? consequences of increasing
recycling

Type Attributional & stand alone Consequential & comparative

Functional unit kg of newspaper OR Kg newsprint with varying % of

t of yearly production recycled material
Reason Leaning (e.g. for preparing Leaning (e.g. for deciding on
policies) recycling)
Audience Public; companies Company internal

Product systems / As detailed as possible: forestry, Only the affected technical

System boundary newsprint, printing, distribution, systems and processes need to
recycling, be included: e.g. forestry, TMP
production, de-inking.
Drying may be left out.
Data National averages Site specific; marginal data
Summary what we learnt so far:
• Flow model
• Calculating the inventory: e.g. energy demand or
CO2 per reference flow
• Goal and scope definition (according to ISO)

• Next time: calculating environmental impacts from

inventory results (e.g. global warming from CO2
emissions)
Thank you for your participation!