Page 40 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

22 A. Bjørn et al.

Mekel and Huppes 1990; Pommer et al. 1991). A comparison of the studies shows
that although they aimed to answer the same question (is returnable packaging or
milk cartons preferable from an environmental and resource perspective?), and
although they compared more or less the same packaging technologies, they
reached very different conclusions. Rather than disqualify LCA as a serious deci-
sion support tool, these findings triggered an international collaboration among
scientists and LCA practitioners from industry and consultancy on furthering LCA
methodology development and harmonisation, as reflected in the strong interna-
tional development work and standardisation in the 1990s. Concurrent with the fast
methodological development of the 1990s the application of LCA expanded to
include numerous other types of products during this decade as reflected in the
proliferation of LCA-based ecolabels. The first LCA-supported Nordic Ecolabel
was initiated in 1989 to guide consumers towards products with the lowest envi-
ronmental impacts, and the number of product categories covered by criteria grew
rapidly under this and other ecolabels like the European Flower label and the
German Blaue Engel (see Chap. 24 on Eco-labelling and environmental product
declarations). Several European countries launched national product-oriented
environmental strategies with LCA as the methodological backbone, presaging
the European Integrated Product Policy(IPP) to be adopted at EU level in 2003 with
policy instruments like the aforementioned ecolabels, environmental product dec-
larations, green public purchase and integration of environmental aspects into
standards development.
After the turn of the century, product applications continued to grow in number
and broaden in scope, also inspired by the increased political focus on LCA in EU
and other parts of the world. LCA studies were increasingly used to analyse
questions on the macro scale related to, for example, national energy systems and
waste management systems. A 2006 survey of LCA practitioners found that LCA
results were primarily used in business strategy, research and development and
product or process design, but that education, policy development and
labelling/product declarations were also frequent uses (Smith Cooper and Fava
2006). A similar survey from 2011 found that most practitioners made LCA studies
in the agriculture (56%) and food sectors (62%), while practitioners working with
other consumer goods (38%) and energy (37%) industries were somewhat less
frequent (Teixeira and Pax 2011). The growth in the private sector’s use of LCA in
the period is reflected in Fig. 3.1 which shows the development in the total annual
number of corporate responsibility reports mentioning LCA.
The year 2008 became an important year in the history of LCA for policy
support, as the European Commission initiated its Sustainable Consumption and
Production and Sustainable Industrial Policy (SCP/SIP) Action Plan, incorporating
the previous IPP and waste and resource strategies and having LCA as the ana-
lytical backbone, but this time without the micromanagement regulation scope
explored by the US EPA three decades earlier. The use of LCA in policy devel-
opment is discussed in Chap. 18.
In 2009, The Sustainability Consortium was formed with the US retailer
Walmart as a central partner with the mission to create a more sustainable consumer