Page 211 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

10 Life Cycle Impact Assessment 197

Fig. 10.4 The fundamental difference in scope and completeness between LCA and footprints
while both apply the life cycle perspective

They can be applied to a large variety of assessment targets like products,
services, organisations, persons and populations, sites and regions, even countries
or the entire world. Their success in the last decades lies in their particular
strengths:
• Easily accessible and intuitive concept
• Easy to communicate about specific environmental issues or achievements with
non-environmental experts (policy and decision-making communities, general
public)
• Availability of data
• Easy to perform
• Wide range of assessment targets can easily be assessed
These strengths, however, also come with a number of important limitations:

• Their focus on one environmental issue does not inform about a potential
burden-shifting from one environmental issue (e.g. climate change) to another
(e.g. water availability). Therefore, while they allow for identification of the best
option for one environmental problem, they are not suitable to support decisions
regarding environmental sustainability, which need to consider all potential
environmental problems.
• Some footprints only assess the quantity of a resource used (e.g. ecological
footprint, CED, MIPS and volumetric water footprint), which is comparable to
the accounting of quantities used or emitted in the life cycle inventory (see
Chap. 9). Such footprints therefore do not inform about the associated envi-
ronmental consequences of the resources used or emissions accounted, and they
do not quantify potential impacts on a given area of protection. Among other,
this limitation compromises the comparability of footprints for different options
to choose from.
• Impact-based footprints (e.g. carbon footprint), at least historically, assess
impacts on midpoint level and hence do not reflect damages, which has
implications on their environmental relevance. However, with an increasing