Life Cycle assessment
Life-cycle assessment (LCA,) is also known
with other names, like cradle-to-grave analysis, or ecobalance. It is a technique for environmental
impacts assessment, applied mainly for products. It is a holistic and wide view of the product’s
impact on the environment, since life cycle assessment cover all impacts all through the
life cycle of the product, from raw materials till assimilation of the product as waste.
As an holistic approach, it can be theoretically be considered the best approach to environmental
assessment. But on the practical, side, there are certain parameters that reduce the applicability
and usefulness f the method. Setting the limits of the assessment: where
should the assessment start? From delivery of the raw materials, or from production of
the raw materials or maybe even from the stage farming of the raw materials?
What is the detail of the assessment ? They all depend on the purpose of the assessment
and the relevant stake holders.
Life Cycle Assessment methodology: basic steps The basic steps towards implementing a Life
Cycle Assessment, are the follows: • Define and set the scope and the limits
of your analysis. Is it for permitting or law compliance?
• Is it for voluntary commitment? • Which of the upstream and downstream collaborators,
should we include? • Inventory analysis: aspects of the environment
that are affected by the assessed activity: recourses, energy, wastes production
• Assign a value, quantitate or qualitative to the impact
• Interpret the assessment, so as to assist decision taking and actions prioritization,
with respect to the scope and the goals of the analysis.
An example of a textile product Life Cycle Assessment for a clothing product is given
in this slide. This is a qualitative assessment. If you do a small research on the T short
environmental impact assessment, you may be surprised to find out, that the bigger impact
comes from the use of the garment.
Ecological footprint of an activity, is an index that aggregates the whole range of environmental
impacts in one single index. This index is the footprint: the quantity
of nature (eg area of productive land, or area of sea etc) that is required in order
to: 1. produce the resources that are consumed
by the activity and 2. eliminate the waste produced by the activity
It is based on the concept of the carrying capacity of the ecosystems, that is the inherent
capacity of the systems to provide material as well as remediate environmental harm. The
footprint is a direct way to demonstrate the size of harm to the ecosystems, because it
provides a comparison of the harm (expressed in units of area) with the real area of the
ecosystem. If for instance, an activity has an environmental footprint that is a significant
percentage of the local forests, that is a clear indication that local forests cannot
afford the impact of this activity, environmental harm is inevitable and the specific activity
is not sustainable.
On the other hand, the concept of environmental footprint provides an advantage for business.
As a single index, it is a simple way to assess environmental performance but in fact, it
is not very informative. Since the environmental footprint sums up all aspects of environmental
impact to one single index, business can trade off between the actions that they should do
in order to reduce their footprint. One example that is quite common, is with companies that
emit gaseous pollutants: instead of reducing these harmful emissions, prefer to finance
tree plantations that has a positive footprint and counter fights the negative footprint
of the emissions.
Conclusion Environmental Performance Assessment is a
structured process, in order to assess the way and the size that an activity affects
the environment, The modern trend to Environmental Performance
Assessment of a product, is the holistic framework of the Life Cycle Approach
Environmental footprint is a convenient index to demonstrate and compare environmental performance
of a product or a business, with significant advantages for the companies.