Environmental Impact Assessment

LCA (Life Cycle Assessment)

Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

o What is an LCA?
o Who benefits from it?
o How does it work?
o What environmental impact does one object have on the world?

Definition : A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an analysis of the impact one object has
on the world around it. This is, in a nutshell, the question that a Life Cycle Assessment
tries to answer.

Life-cycle analysis (LCA), also known as life-cycle assessment, is a primary tool used to
support decision-making for sustainable development. According to the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, LCA is a tool to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of a
product, material, process, or activity.

Life-cycle analysis (LCA), also known as life-cycle assessment, is a primary tool used to
support decision-making for sustainable development. According to the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, LCA is a tool to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of a
product, material, process, or activity. Crucially, an LCA is a comprehensive method for
assessing all direct and indirect environmental impacts across the full life cycle of a product
system, from materials acquisition, to manufacturing, to use, and to final disposition (disposal
or reuse).

The ―cradle-to-grave‖ accounting concept of LCA is depicted as follows ...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a very popular analysis for reporting potential environmental
loads and resources consumed in each step of a product or service supply chain. Although its
use is mainly associated with the estimation of the environmental impact of products, some
studies have also used a LCA for cities. Since in LCA data are collected for all processes that
have been identified as relevant to include within the chosen system boundary, its application
at the city level imply a time-consuming process requiring a large amount of input data.
Therefore, estimating the carbon footprint at the city level by LCA is not recommended due
to its complexity. However, LCA has a great level of accuracy and is able to provide
responses to actions as well as important information for policy makers interested in
improving the environmental performances and understanding the potential of GHG
mitigation art the city level.

How environmentally friendly were the products you have just bought? Should I have bought
the tomatoes from The Netherlands or from Spain?

But answering this question isn’t easy – because there are countless factors involved:

 Raw Materials: Soil, seeds, fertilizer?

 Production: Heating, Water, Ventilation?
 Transportation: Trucks, Rails or Airplane?

This will get confusing really quickly because we don‘t know all the factors we have to
consider for our life cycle analysis.

This is why the Life Cycle Assessment provides a framework for measuring the impact of,
for example, a product.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology that has been developed to evaluate the
environmental impact of buildings, with respect to their processes, their materials and use
(energy) throughout the whole life cycle of a building. It is not to be confused with Life
Cycle Costs which instead focuses on cost reduction, especially interesting when embarking
in the design and construction of Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs).

The objective of LCA is to evaluate the environmental impacts of a product from its
fabrication to the end of its life, including possible recycling, as set out in the
ISO14040:2006 standard. In general, three areas of protection are considered: human health,
the natural environment (also named ecosystems), and natural resources. This recent article
provides some examples of objectives and related indicators as shown in the table below.

Objective Related indicator

Preserve raw materials
Save energy
Save water
Manage land use
Limit toxic emissions
Protect the climate
Protect fauna and flora
Protect forests
Protect rivers and lakes
Improve outside air quality
Reduce waste
Reduce radioactive waste
Abiotic resource depletion
Cumulative energy demand
Water used
Land occupation, Transformation
Damage to health
Greenhouse effect (100 years)
Damage to biodiversity
Acidification
Eutrophication
Photochemical ozone production
Waste production
Radioactive waste

Examples of objectives and related indicators for LCA

Using Life Cycle Assessment is one of the most effective ways to find out the impact on the
environment resulting from construction methods, energy concepts, components and
products. This involves all aspects of planning that take place in the construction of a new
building and a renovation project. LCA can hence be considered a tool to both reduce the
consumption of finite resources and to keep environmentally critical air, water and soil
pollution to a minimum across all phases of a building's life. The DGNB (German
Sustainable Building Council) has developed a set of guidelines with the primary goal to
plan, operate and use the built environment in order to encourage designers and building
contractors to employ life cycle assessment.

An effective and efficient real application of this methodology requires the integration of
LCA databases and analysis routines in commonly used simulation tools such as energy
performance simulation and Building Information Modelling (BIM). The integration of LCA
tools significantly impacts the design efficacy especially in reducing environmental impacts
of the construction industry.

A recent study presented the results of a full LCA applied to 24 statistically-based dwelling
archetypes, representative of the EU housing stock in 2010. With the aim to quantify the
average environmental impacts related to housing in Europe and to define reference values (
the baseline scenario) for policy development. Here, the environmental life cycle impact
assessment was carried out using the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD)
method. EU average annual environmental impact per person, per dwelling and per m2 were
calculated. Results showed that the average life cycle greenhouse gas emissions related to
housing per person per year were 2.62 t CO2eq, compared to a representative dwelling per
year of 6.36 t CO2eq. The use phase (energy and water consumption) was the most relevant
aspect, followed by the production of construction materials and maintenance. It was found
that single-family houses are responsible for the highest share of impacts from housing in
Europe. The same type of building has different impacts in different climatic zones,
especially because of differences in the need for space heating. In general, electricity use and
space heating are the activities that contribute the most to the overall impacts.

The fundamental principle of a life cycle assessment (LCA) is that the impact of
a so-called ―functional unit‖ (such as a kg of bread) is assessed comprehensively without
omitting one or several impact categories. This is based on the conviction that a comparison
between different processes or value chain producing the same functional unit—or a
comparison between different product cannot be done only if looking at, for example,
greenhouse gas emissions or eutrophication or ozone depletion, but requires appreciation of
all possible impacts.

Environmental assessment is a procedure that ensures that the environmental implications of

decisions are taken into account before the decisions are made. Environmental assessment
can be undertaken for individual projects, such as a dam, motorway, airport or factory, on the
basis of Directive 2011/92/EU (known as ‗Environmental Impact Assessment‘ – EIA
Directive) or for public plans or programmes on the basis of Directive 2001/42/EC (known as
‗Strategic Environmental Assessment‘ – SEA Directive). The common principle of both
Directives is to ensure that plans, programmes and projects likely to have significant effects
on the environment are made subject to an environmental assessment, prior to their approval
or authorisation. Consultation with the public is a key feature of environmental assessment
procedures.

It’s All About the Life Cycle

Today, the impact of products and services on the environment has become a key element of
decision-making processes. Instead of considering only fragments of environmental impacts
such as those resulting from production, use or disposal, societies of the future will have to
consider a product‘s life cycle as a whole. Against this background, ‗Life Cycle Thinking‘
has become a central pillar in environmental policies and sustainable business decision-
making. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool to review the environmental impact of
products throughout their entire life cycle – (from cradle to grave) – from raw material
extraction through transport, manufacturing and use all the way to their end of life. In order
for the analysis to be meaningful, it is essential to use consistent and reliable data. Therefore,
a crucial first step in the LCA process is the production of a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). The
LCI is an extensive set of data on the relevant energy and material inputs and environmental
outputs.