Policy Options for Life Cycle Assessment Deployment in Legislation

Abstract

Life cycle thinking is on the political agenda and widely used in practice. Moreover, numerous industries have actively been developing life cycle assessment (LCA) approaches for many years. As the authors think that it is in substance ``right'' to base environmental legislation on LCA, they started to explore and to develop policy options for integrating LCA into legislation. Commissioned by WorldAutoSteel, the authors focused on CO2 legislation in the automotive industry, but the options developed based on this example can be used for other industries and other environmental impacts as well. It was found that theoretically a broad range of policy options exists, and that practically some of them are already implemented in real world legislation and that there is no clear scientific overall preference for one single option. It was also shown that solutions for most technical requirements are already available, but that a consensus on proper setting of these requirements is missing.