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LIFE CYCLE IMPACT ASSESSMENT FOR INCREASING INDUSTRIAL SUSTAINABILITY
Citation:
Bare*, J C. LIFE CYCLE IMPACT ASSESSMENT FOR INCREASING INDUSTRIAL SUSTAINABILITY. Presented at SETAC 21st Annual Meeting, Nashville, TN, 11/14/2000.
Description:
Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) can be a very useful decision support tool for assisting in environmental decision making to allow the pursuit of increasing sustainability. Increasing sustainability will be defined and presented as a more concrete and quantifiable goal when compared to the ill-defined "sustainable development." LCIA will be presented as the framework for characterizing corporate management philosophies within a consistent decision support framework. Ideally, these LCIAs would completely characterize all impact categories to the highest level of sophistication and comprehensiveness with the highest quality data. In the spirit of practicality, however, many assumptions and simplifications are made to allow for such a broad analysis, and there is no current standardized methodology. ISO 14042 provided some guidance, especially for Comparative Assertions (public claims of superiority of products or services), but in many ways allowed for varying approaches. Industrial partners within the Sustainability Metrics Working Group of the American Institute of chemical Engineers (AICHE) are trying to develop some consistency in their approach to this issue, as are LCIA working groups in the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC). While providing the history of these three groups (ISO, AiCHE Sustainability Metrics WG, and the SETAC WG) and two International workshops, the speaker will introduce some conflicting viewpoints of the following technical issues: the sophistication and comprehensiveness of LCIA, endpoints vs. midpoints, and the role of value choices in LCIA. The speaker will also provide a real-life example of one corporate decision based upon LCIA for increasing sustainability.