1 Introduction
Resource scarcities, environmental pollution and the need for renewable energies have been in the centre of interest for a few decades already. As early as in the 1970s researchers and decision makers were interested in the resource use and environmental damage implications of particular products and packaging options. This has been the starting point for the development of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, which is nowadays the most established and widely used method to assess the environmental impacts of products, services and technologies. This essay explains the basic idea of LCA and its current state in business practice. It explores some of the most important future developments and related research demands. The essay is part of a book that summarizes contributions from young LCA researchers that participated in the 13th Ökobilanzwerkstatt (“LCA workshop”) at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, in September 2017. Hence, the essay finally elaborates the role of the Ökobilanzwerkstatt for progressing LCA research and practice.
Most useful references to LCA and its developments can be found in textbooks (e.g. Hauschild et al. 2018), standards and guidelines (e.g. ISO 14040 and 14044 and EC-JRC 2010), and journals (International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, Journal of Cleaner Production, and Journal of Industrial Ecology, to name a few).
2 LCA in a Nutshell
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used to assess environmental impacts of product and service systems over the whole life cycle from raw material extraction to end of life. LCA is used for decision making on various levels and within different functions and organizations including product comparisons and technology evaluations on corporate levels up to political and macro-scale studies on the effects of environmental policies. The common LCA approach following ISO 14040 and 14044 distinguishes four essential process steps required in all types of studies: goal and scope, life cycle inventory, life cycle impact assessment, and interpretation, all of which are elaborated in an iterative manner.
Goal and scope defines the framework of a study including spatial, temporal and technical requirements and system boundaries. Furthermore, it defines the study’s functional unit, which describes the product or service system’s benefit. All products or technologies under comparison and their impacts as well as different scenarios of the same product systems are scaled to the same functional unit in order to ensure comparability. The Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) records all material and energy flows (raw materials, emissions, intermediates etc.) that flow into or out of the system under assessment. While some LCI data for very important and focal steps of the life cycle is measured and gathered directly, much data for life cycle processes further up or down the chain is derived from generic LCI databases. Within Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) the LCI records are assessed according to their contribution to certain environmental impact categories such as global warming, eutrophication, resource depletion, or land use change. The Interpretation step within LCA evaluates the results further and discloses uncertainties and insufficiencies of previous steps in order to improve the overall assessment.
3 LCA Development
Since its early days more than 40 years ago, LCA has constantly developed and diversified. For instance, the well-known carbon footprint follows LCA procedures with its LCIA focusing on one particular environmental impact only, namely the global warming potential. Instead of product and services, corporate carbon footprints and organization’s environmental footprints extent the idea of LCA to organizations and their performance over time. Besides environmental impacts, LCA is also capable of considering economic and social aspects in life cycle cost assessments or Social LCA respectively. This diversification and extension of the initial LCA ideas is accompanied by an increasing level of standardization. For instance, so called product category rules define frameworks for particular groups of products like dairy in order to ensure comparability of LCA studies in that group. Environmental product declarations are the standardized documents of such assessments. The before mentioned developments are consequences of academic progress and the continuous growth of LCA within business. Nowadays, large car manufacturers, chemical companies, plastics associations or the construction sector use and disclose LCA studies (or excerpts thereof) routinely and therefore require a feasible degree of standardization. At the same time, LCA-related service companies (consulting, software etc.) are established parts of the global business world. LCA is taught at universities and has become a core expertise of academic faculties, institutes, and think tanks in fields such as industrial ecology, sustainability assessment, environmental engineering and so forth. In larger research settings, especially within EU funding schemes, LCA studies are often mandatory and an integral part of accompanying research.
Concluding that LCA is therefore fully matured appears to be exaggerated, though. Within the core methodology issues such as allocation, uncertainty analysis, or comparison and weighting of environmental impact categories leave room for further improvement. Data gaps and data quality can still be troubling, especially when it comes to geographically distinct information. Social LCA and the integration of environmental, social, and economic LCA to form a sustainability LCA are in their early stages. The search for the best system representation in large-scale settings has led to discussions of attributional vs. consequential modeling. The digitalization and big data age raises questions of automated LCA and full integration into enterprise resource planning systems and other IT tools. Paradigms like circular economy and cradle-to-cradle match life cycle thinking well, but the exact interplay leaves room for further research and development.
4 Role of Research and Young Researcher Networks
While further standardization is industry’s consequence to the challenges above, increased research activities are an obvious academic response. LCA research necessitates interdisciplinary approaches, which is true for the fundamental and methodological challenges as well as for the challenges in direct application contexts. Accordingly, LCA research does not only take place at a few specialized institutes for life cycle thinking or industrial ecology, but at many rather different organizations and institutes, of which some focus on thermodynamics and process engineering while others are rooted in sociology or forestry. LCA is common ground for some of their research activities and provides opportunities for mutual learning. In many of such cases, LCA knowledge acquisition happens on-the-job or “on-the-PhD”, so that peer groups to discuss ideas and challenges are highly important.
One such peer group is the “Ökobilanzwerkstatt” (translates to “LCA workshop”, see http://www.oekobilanzwerkstatt.tu-darmstadt.de). This workshop gathers PhD students and further young LCA researches from German-speaking countries and provides room for in-depth discussions of their ongoing research including inputs from senior experts and practitioners in the field. Coordinated by Darmstadt Technical University, 13 annual workshops took place since 2005 at various universities and institutes. These activities have supported interdisciplinary LCA research within German-speaking countries tremendously and initiated the development of further regional and informal LCA researcher networks. Gathering experience in publishing peer-reviewed LCA papers is a further goal of the network. For instance, previous workshop organizers edited a special issue of the journal Sustainability Management Forum (SMF 2016) to publish the participants’ short papers after a peer-review process. This current book comprises peer-reviewed contributions from the 2017 Ökobilanzwerkstatt at Technische Universität Braunschweig and demonstrates the interdisciplinarity and diversity of LCA research.