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LIFE CYCLE ENGINEERING GUIDELINES
Citation:
Smith Cooper, J. AND B. Vigon. LIFE CYCLE ENGINEERING GUIDELINES. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/R-01/101, 2001.
Description:
LCE depends on understanding performance, cost, and environmental implications and translating them into engineering requirements, goals, and specifications. Related decisions are iterative in nature. As the engineering process proceeds from the conceptual to defined, the LCE evaluation will reevaluate earlier decisions and expand or contract the coverage to ensure that the broadest set of improvement opportunities are considered, substantial environmental implications are not missed, and consequences are not inadvertently shifted from one life cycle stage to another. Through repeated application, engineers, managers, and other technical experts become progressively more proficient in using LCE. The purpose of this document is to provide guidelines for the implementation of LCE concepts, information, and techniques in engineering products, systems, processes, and facilities. To make this document as practical and useable as possible, a unifying LCE framework is presented. Subsequent topics are organized according to a classification scheme that reflects the generic types of engineering decisions that are candidate to include environmental implications in conjunction with cost and performance requirements.