You are here:
EVALUATION OF PUBLIC DATABASES AS SOURCES OF DATA FOR LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENTS
Citation:
EVALUATION OF PUBLIC DATABASES AS SOURCES OF DATA FOR LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENTS. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-00/019 (NTIS Not to NTIS).
Description:
Methods to determine the environmental effects of production systems must encourage a comprehensive evaluation of all "upstream" and "downstream" effects and their interrelationships. This cradle-to-grave approach, called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), has led to the development of many techniques to calculate, assess, and improve the environmental performance of production systems. However, developers have had difficulty creating a consistent and comprehensive LCA approach that is practical for a widespread application. Pressure has been mounting for more streamlined methods that allow for simpler and more rapid LCA's.
The Research Triangle Institute (RTI) conducted work under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Risk Management Research Laboratory (NRMRL), to research, develop, and demonstrate streamlined LCA studies. The research included: (1) LCA practitioner interviews to identify common streamlining approaches, (2) case studies implementing the streamlining approaches and comparing results to more complete life-cycle studies, (3) guidelines for conducting streamlined LCA studies, a and (4) a computer-based tool to perform impact screening.
In this project, the University of Kansas, Small Business Environmental Assistance Program and RTI worked in cooperation to systematically evaluate several publicly available data sources for their use in constructing generic LCA data sets. This report identifies the usefulness of various public databases in an LCA context and demonstrates methods for using the data in LCA studies. The limitations to using public sources of data are also discussed. Finally, an example LCA data set is developed for steel mill products from public data sources and is compared against a steel mill data set developed by a private LCA consulting firm.
This study shows that it is possible to extract meaningful information for U.S. public database for use in LCA studies.