Evaluation of process- and input-output-based life cycle inventory data with regard to truncation and aggregation issues

Abstract

Life cycle assessments (LCA) and environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) analyses both strive to account for direct and indirect environmental impacts of goods and services. Different methods have been developed to hybridize these two techniques and minimize the impact of their respective shortcomings on final assessments. These weaknesses, however, have not been extensively studied in a quantitative manner, especially not for complete LCA and EEIO databases. To this end, we jointly analyzed process-based and input-output-based data sets. We first evaluated their complementarity. Though the LCA data was more detailed overall, some sectors of the economy were more precisely represented in the EEIO database. We then contrasted the representation of the different economic sectors in the LCA database with the economic, environmental, and structural importance of these sectors. The weakness of the correlation results led us to conclude that process-inventory efforts have not been systematically directed at the most important sectors of the economy. The LCA data was also used to evaluate the sensitivity of EEIO data to aggregation uncertainty. This sensitivity proved highly inhomogeneous. We conclude the presence of important research inefficiencies stemming from the lack of hybrid perspective in the compilation of LCA and EEIO data. © 2011 American Chemical Society.