Page 36 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

18 A. Bjørn et al.

• Outline the history of LCA from the 1970s to the present in terms of method-
ological development, application, international harmonisation and standardis-
ation and dissemination.

3.1 Introduction

Concerns over environmental pollution and energy and material scarcity have
motivated the development of life-cycle-oriented approaches for environmental
profiling of products. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has experienced a strong
development both in methodology and applications since the first life-cycle-
oriented methods were proposed in the 1960s. Today LCA is defined as “a tool to
assess the potential environmental impacts and resources used throughout a pro-
duct’s life cycle, i.e. from raw material acquisition, via production and use stages, to
waste management” (ISO 2006b). In this chapter, we present a brief account of the
history of LCA in terms of methodological development, standardisation and reg-
ulation, application, and education and dissemination. Important elements of the
history are summarised chronologically in Table 3.1.

3.2 Methodological Development

Life-cycle-oriented methods that were precursors of today’s LCA were developed
in the 1960s in collaboration between universities and industry. They were known
as Resource and Environmental Profile Analysis (REPA) (Hunt et al. 1992)or
Ecobalances until the term LCA became the norm in the 1990s. The method
development initiated in the US and mainly took place there and in Northern
Europe. Early methods could be characterised as material and energy accounting
and were inspired by material flow accounting, as they were focused on invento-
rying energy and resource use (crude oil, steel, etc.), emissions and generation of
solid waste, from each industrial process in the life cycle of product systems.
As inventories got more complex, the initial focus on accounting the physical
flows in a product life cycle was gradually extended with a translation of the
inventory results into environmental impact potentials. In other words, from a list of
resource uses and emissions a set of indicator scores for an assessed product was
calculated, representing contributions to a number of impacts categories, such as
climate change, eutrophication and resource scarcity.
In the early years of the LCA history, environmental concerns addressed by the
methods tended to shift with public concerns, and there was no consistency or
harmonisation of the applied methods. In some years, the focus was on the gen-
eration of solid waste, which was considered problematic, especially in the US,
where landfilling was the dominant waste management practice. In other years,