Page 346 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

330 5 Life Cycle Interpretation, Reporting and Critical Review

(1993–2000) was initiated. ISO adapted the four-phase LCA structure with one
5)
major exception: the ambitious ‘improvement analysis’ phase was discarded. As
a replacement, a new phase, ‘interpretation’, was developed and introduced as
6)
international standard ISO 14043. This inclusion into the standard turned out to
be a meaningful and beneficial phase of LCA for the following reasons:

• Interpretation (fourth phase) is the counterpart of the scientifically similar ‘soft’
phase ‘definition of goal and scope’ (first phase). Here, an examination of
consistency between results and goal has to be made.
• It has to be examined and documented whether the quality of the data and applied
methods is sufficient to support the results.
• Strong regulations apply for the interpretation phase if the LCA is to be used for
comparative assertions made publicly available.

Reporting and critical review are, strictly speaking, not part of the interpretation
phase, as they report on all four phases and evaluate them. They, however, follow
the interpretation phase, so a joint consideration of both makes sense.

• Rules for a critical review are prescribed, which are strictly mandatory for
comparative assertions, but otherwise optional.
• Reporting is also regulated as regards confidential data. On the one hand, the
reports comply with expectations of the economic operators regarding the confi-
dentiality of data, and on the other hand, the critical reviews, if commissioned,
are integrated as a fixed part into the reports.

The issues addressed above will be explained on the basis of the standards
ISO 14040:2006 and 14044:2006 and on some scientific papers. Interpretation
has, however, been less inspiring to scientists than, for example, life cycle impact
assessment (LCIA). This may be due to the fact that substantial aspects of weighting
of results on the basis of value choices, defined as transparently as possible, are
still part of the impact assessment instead of being included in the interpretation
phase (see Sections 4.3.3.2 and 4.3.3.3).
Since implicitly evaluated results are obtained via the retained value choices,
which belong to the human and social sciences, an improved delimitation to the
phases of ‘inventory analysis’ and ‘impact assessment’ primarily based on natural
sciences and technology (the ‘hard-core’ of LCA ) would be possible.
7)
This opportunity for a more logical structuring was missed out in the former
standard of ISO 14043:2000 and, has not been made use of even following the
revision of the LCA standards completed in 2006. 8)

5) This is in as much justified as an LCA besides a product optimization can have different
applications. A small list was integrated into ISO 14040 (1997).
6) Saur (1997), Lecouls (1999), ISO (2000) and Marsmann (2000).
7) Kl¨ opffer (1998).
8) ISO (2000, 2006a) and Finkbeiner et al. (2006).