Page 188 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

174 R.K. Rosenbaum et al.

IMPACT World+
IMPACT 2002+ (Canada, USA, Denmark,
(Switzerland)
France, Switzerland)
Eco-Indicator 99 LUCAS
(Netherlands) (Canada)
CML 2001 (IA) EcoScarcity2006 EcoScarcity2013
(Netherlands) (Switzerland) (Switzerland)

2000 2002 2003 2004 2006 2007 2009 2010 2011 2012 2016

EPS2000 TRACI TRACI 2.0
(Sweden) (USA) (USA)
LC-
ILCD
EDIP2003 ReCiPe IMPACT
(Denmark) (Netherlands) (EU) (EU)

Jepix (Japan) LIME 2.0 LIME 3.0
LIME (Japan) (Japan) (Japan)

Fig. 10.1 LCIA methods published since 2000 with country/region of origin in brackets. Dotted
arrows represent methodology updates (Rosenbaum 2017)

that all meet the requirements of ISO 14044. A more detailed overview of these
methods can be found in Chap. 40.
When selecting an LCIA method, the requirements, recommendations, external
and internal factors and constraints discussed above all need to be considered. This
leads to a number of questions and criteria that should be answered in order to
systematically identify the most suitable one. Here is a non-exhaustive list of rel-
evant questions to address:

• Which impact categories (or environmental problems) do I need to cover and
can I justify those that I am excluding?
• In which region does my life cycle (or its most contributing processes) take
place?
• Do I need midpoint or endpoint assessment, or both?
• Which elementary flows do I need to characterise?
• Are there any recommendations from relevant organisations that can help me
choose?
• How easily can the units of the impact categories be interpreted (e.g. absolute
units, equivalents, monetary terms, etc.)?
• How well is the method documented?
• How easily can the results (units, aggregation into specific indicator groups,
etc.) be communicated?
• Do I need to apply normalisation and if yes for which reference system (in most
cases it is not recommendable to mix characterisation and normalisation factors