Opportunities and challenges for addressing variations in the use phase with LCA and Design for Sustainable Behaviour

Abstract

For Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies of products where the use phase is responsible for a large share of the total environmental impact, variations in the way the products are being used may have a significant impact on the results. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a better understanding of the use phase, and possibly techniques and experience applied in Design for Sustainable Behaviour (DfSB), may contribute to the way LCA deals with uncertainties related to variations in the use phase. To inform the investigation of how variations in the use phase are dealt with in the LCA literature today, three previously published LCA studies are analysed. Among these studies, there is a clear variation in where the (limited) attention given to this uncertainty is directed to, and how this is done. Improving the understanding of the potential variations and thereby the ability to take them into account in the LCA may require additional measurements. For situations where limited resources make extensive real-life user studies problematic, a small-scale approach is suggested. The DfSB literature both contains insight into how a large number of user research methods best can be applied to investigate the environmental aspects of how people interact with products and a growing database of case studies that may contribute to reducing the uncertainty of the use phase in LCAs.