Life cycle thinking for improved resource management: LCA or?

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has become one of the most widely applied scientific and industrial methods for estimating environmental impacts of products and services. While the necessity to adopt a life cycle perspective as such was rather quickly accepted, the practical application of LCA has met considerable doubt and lagged behind. Strong contributing factors for this slow adaptation have been (i) a poor understanding of the LCA idea as such, (ii) a lack of useful tools for routine application of LCA, (iii) a lack of useful data and databases, (iv) poorly developed practices and processes for monitoring and data acquisition in industry and society in general, and (v) a general resistance to introduce a new concept. Now that these barriers gradually are being overcome, there is a need for some second and critical thoughts around the usefulness and practical applicability of LCA as a standard routine procedure in society. While doubtlessly having contributed to a revolution in systems thinking, the practical current application of LCA has several shortcomings: (i) There is a poor link between estimated emissions and (ia) the geographical location of them and (ib) the occurrence in time of them, (ii) an LCA rarely discusses the total emissions from a production site or service system since emissions are reported and discussed in relation to the functional unit, (iii) the methodology for LCA demands both categorization of material and energy flows into a large number of impact categories while in practice only a few are selected and sometimes in a rather arbitrary way, based more on the availability of data than based on relevance, (iv) the necessity to pull the assessment through the impact stage requires considerable extra skills and work by the assessing industry or agent, (v) when gradually more complex systems are being assessed, the system boundaries become more difficult to identify and the assessor faces the challenge to assess life cycles in different dimensions. The chapter describes the gradual development of life cycle thinking, LCA, and other life cycle thinking tools. It argues for a more differentiated application of life cycle thinking in practical tools in order to increase the practical usefulness of this important approach.