Page 355 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

5.4 Reporting 339

in an adequate form to the intended audience, addressing the data, methods and
assumptions applied in the study, and the limitations thereof.
The Standard ISO 14044 24) provides detailed regulations concerning reporting.
Sections 5.2 (Additional requirements and guidance for third-party reports) and 5.3
(Further reporting requirements for comparative assertion intended to be disclosed to the
public) should especially be considered. ‘Third parties’ are interested parties ‘besides
the commissioner and practitioner of the study’. 25) The report to third parties can be
based on a documentation of the study, which may contain confidential data and
as such cannot be made accessible. This is an important task of the critical review
(see Section 5.5), which must state that non-published data that are accessible to
the reviewers are appropriate for the study.
The requirement on reports according to the above Sections 5.2 and 5.3 of ISO
14044 are detailed, four and a half pages within the bilingual version, and taken
literally would expand the report of even small LCAs to hundreds of pages. There
is thus a conflict between an intention to avoid fraud in consequence of badly
elaborated LCAs and legibility. We recommend to practitioners and reviewers of a
third-party report (Section 5.2), even more if comparative assertions are included,
to carefully read the respective sections of the standard and to adapt them as best
as possible. However, the report needs to be legible and inspiring for the target
group, ‘exciting’ to some extent, as for every comparative LCA there is always a
concern on ‘who wins’ even though restrictions have to be addressed. In case
of over-simplifications, the standard provides a means for reviewers and, later,
targeted parties to demand a higher transparency.
If the report is not regarded as document 26) but as a scientific-technical publi-
cation, the principles of scientific perception of knowledge as well as publication
conventions apply in addition to the rules defined by the standard. 27) The most
important rule by Karl Popper 28) states that hypotheses and theories have to be
formulated in such a way as to be eligible for falsification (thus refuted). It is only
by multiple futile falsification efforts that a hypothesis or a theory can mature into
a natural law, as long as it is not replaced by a more comprehensive one. 29) Even if
the requirements of natural science cannot be met in all detail in LCAs, we should
always thrive for the best possible adaptation to the ideal (Kl¨ opffer, 2007, loc. cit.).
For an illustration of the report, an attractive graphical representation is ade-
quate, for example, coloured bar diagrams for sectoral analysis, but an obtrusive
marketing-orientated version should be avoided. To make the study accessible to
further interested parties, a publication at the website of the commissioner or
the practitioner is a good solution. The consent of critical reviewers to a legible

24) ISO (2006b).
25) Commissioner, practitioner or interested party generally are not individuals but enterprises,
associations, social groups and so on.
26) A negative example concerning legibility is the report on good laboratory practice (GLP).
27) Kl¨ opffer (2007).
28) Popper (1934).
29) ISO (2006a,b). Popper’s theories have been strongly influenced by Einstein’s ‘falsification’ of
Newton’s theory, which had been regarded as axiomatic.