Life Cycle Assessment

A life cycle assessment (’LCA’, also known as life cycle analysis, life cycle inventory, ecobalance, cradle-to-grave-analysis, well-to-wheel analysis, and dust-to-dust energy cost) is the assessment of the environmental impact of a given product or service throughout its lifespan.

The goal of LCA is to compare the environmental performance of products and services, to be able to choose the least burdensome one. The term ‘life cycle’ refers to the notion that a fair, holistic assessment requires the assessment of raw material production, manufacture, distribution, use and disposal including all intervening transportation steps. This is the life cycle of the product. The concept also can be used to optimize the environmental performance of a single product (ecodesign) or to optimize the environmental performance of a company. The term ‘emergy’ is often used as an analysis tool to determine embodied energy.

The pollution caused by usage also is part of the analysis. For a hydro electric power plant, for example, construction pollution is considered, but so is the decay in biomass on land flooded to create the dam because it cannot absorb CO2 anymore. This biomass decay is called “CO2 equivalent”.

Common categories of assessed damages are global warming (greenhouse gases), acidification, smog, ozone layer depletion, eutrophication, ecotoxic and anthropotoxic pollutants, desertification, land use as well as depletion of minerals and fossil fuels.