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5
Life Cycle Interpretation, Reporting and Critical Review

Interpretation is the phase of a life cycle assessment (LCA) where conclusions
are drawn from the results of the inventory and the impact assessment and
recommendations are made according to the objective of the study. Hence it refers
to the reasons for the accomplishment of the study.
Care should be taken for a thorough elaboration of issues that are substantially
relevant to the study. Boundary conditions and comprehensibility of all conclusions
should again be critically assessed. In matters of depth, detail and legibility of the
report, compromises have to be found. Purely formal processing of objectives
according to ISO 14044 may produce documents of poor legibility that do not have
the desired benefit for the reader.

5.1
Development and Rank of the Interpretation Phase

In the 20 years prior to the harmonisation efforts by Society of Environmental
Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), LCAs or ‘proto LCAs’ were inventories,
1)
sometimes supplemented by rudimental impact assessment. The first SETAC
workshop on LCA (held 18–23 August 1990, at Smugglers Notch, Vermont) had
already proposed a mandatory impact assessment and the investigation of possible
improvements on the basis of a product-related environmental analysis now called
2)
life cycle assessment (see Section 1.2). Although LCAs have been used, in one form
or another, even before the term was coined, the report of this workshop is in fact
the first document that made use of this term for defining the method. At that
3)
time, the third component of the ‘SETAC triangle’ was ‘improvement analysis,’
which was regarded as a breakthrough. It became the fourth component with the
introduction of a first phase (definition of goal and scope) at the SETAC workshop
in Sandestin, Florida, 1992. This structure for LCA was preserved in the guideline
‘Code of Practice’ developed at the SETAC workshop in Sesimbra, Portugal, 1993. 4)
Shortly after the workshop of Sesimbra, the ISO standardisation process of LCA

1) Kl¨ opffer (2006), and SETAC (2008).
2) SETAC (1991).
3) Model of the structure of an LCA.
4) SETAC (1993).

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): A Guide to Best Practice, First Edition.
Walter Kl¨ opffer and Birgit Grahl.
c 2014 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. Published 2014 by Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.