Page 23 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

1 About This Book 5

The second part is a textbook aiming at university students from undergraduate
to PhD level, and professionals from industry and within policy making who need a
thorough and pedagogical introduction to LCA methodology. The textbook has
been developed based on a cumulated experience from more than three decades
with teaching LCA to engineering students at undergraduate and master level
courses at Technical University of Denmark and Polytechnique Montréal, Canada,
and it is intended to provide a complete curriculum for such courses.
The structure of the introduction to the LCA methodology follows the ISO
framework (as presented and elaborated in the ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards
(ISO 2006a, b)), and we have strived to keep the use of technical terms in accor-
dance with the ISO terminology. When it comes to the methodological details, the
ISO standards refrain from prescriptions or recommendations for many of the
detailed decisions and choices that must be made by a practitioner who wants to
perform an LCA. Here, we have sought inspiration in LCA methods published over
the years, including the EDIP method (Wenzel et al. 1997; Hauschild and Wenzel
1998), the Ecoinvent methodologies (Weidema et al. 2013), the Consequential LCA
(Ekvall and Weidema 2004), as well as more recent projects within the UNEP/
SETAC Life Cycle Initiative and the development of the IMPACT World+ (http://
www.impactworldplus.org), the LC-Impact (http://www.lc-impact.eu), or the ILCD
life cycle impact assessment methods (Hauschild et al. 2013), and not least in the
detailed guidance offered by the General guide for Life Cycle Assessment, the
‘ILCD Handbook’ that was elaborated by the European Commission to serve as the
methodological backbone of its International Reference Life Cycle Data System
(EC-JRC 2010). The ILCD Handbook was developed through a broad international
consultation process with LCA experts, stakeholders and the public from all over
the world with the ambition to minimize ambiguity in LCA studies and provide
governments and businesses with a basis for assuring quality and consistency of life
cycle data, methods and assessments (EC-JRC 2010; Pennington et al. 2010; Sala
et al. 2012). Building on methodological elements from previously published LCA
methods, it offers prescriptions and recommendations for all the most important
methodological choices that you meet when performing an LCA. We use the ILCD
method as a solidly founded, well documented, and detailed reference methodology
that is in full accordance with the ISO standards and details methodology
descriptions far beyond them.
This part of the textbook offers separate chapters on each phase of the LCA
methodology and additional chapters on life cycle costing and social life cycle
assessment as well as chapters on central methodological aspects like uncertainty
management and sensitivity analysis, and use of input–output analysis in LCA.
The third part of the book offers a collection of chapters introducing applica-
tions of LCA and life cycle thinking by policy- and decision-makers in government
and industry, written by authors who are experts in the field of their chapter. They
start out with policy applications around the world and organizational LCA, then
move on to industrial applications, life cycle management, ecodesign, environ-
mental labels and declarations, and the Cradle to cradle concept. The focus then
moves on to the application of LCA to different technological areas like energy