Lessons learned from assessing life cycle impacts for an environmental product declaration: Examples for run-of-river power plant

Abstract

When conducting life cycle assessments (LCA) for environmental product declarations (EPD), researchers struggle with many methodological questions. For certain products there are several standards (e.g. ISO and EN) and Product Category Rules (PCR) available which all seem applicable. These standards, however, might lead to different results. Depending on the standard, system boundaries might be drawn differently than typically done in ones preferred background database. Another common issue is a lack of a clear definition of assessment methods (version, download of factors) to be applied. Or on a more practical level, you might not know how or where to obtain certain requested figures from your LCA data or even how to start with building an appropriate model in the LCA-software. The authors of this paper explain each of these issues with an example from their practical work, provide their instant solutions and make suggestions for general improvement of the situation. In general, they call for a more precise and practical guideline and easy-to-use LCIA methods for conducting EPDs.