Page 42 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

24 A. Bjørn et al.

Portugal, in 1993 leading to the development of the first official guidelines for LCA
(SETAC 1993b)—a Code of practice for LCA. Through the rest of the 1990s
SETAC working groups in Europe and North America further discussed the
methodological elements with particular focus on inventory modelling and life
cycle impact assessment, regularly publishing their recommendations in SETAC
working group reports presenting the agreed state of the art and delivering rec-
ommendations for further research. The working groups helped coordinate the
method development and strengthen the collaboration between the different
research teams developing the LCA methods and they played an important role in
the strong developments in LCA methodology through the 1990s. The work in
these international fora was building on several important national and regional
methodology development projects like the Nordic LCA Guideline project (Nordic
Council of Ministers 1992; Lindfors et al. 1995), The Dutch LCA Handbook
(Guinée et al. 2002) and the Danish EDIP project (Wenzel et al. 1997; Hauschild
and Wenzel 1998)
In the late 1990s, leading researchers from the SETAC working group on life
cycle impact assessment reached out to the United Nations Environmental Program
(UNEP) to create a partnership to ensure further development of good LCA practice
and global dissemination beyond Europe, North America and Japan, which had thus
far been the main activity centres. The UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative was
launched in 2002 and its changing working groups have taken over the method
development activities of SETAC and increasingly focused on the dissemination of
life cycle practices to the emerging economies through development of training
materials and support with access to tools and data. The methodological recom-
mendations have gained a more authoritative status with a formalised review pro-
cedure under the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative.

3.4.2 International Standardisation

Taking off after the development of the SETAC code of practice for LCA in 1993, a
formal standardisation process was initiated under the auspices of the International
Organization of Standardization (ISO) to develop a global standard for LCA,
building on the previous years’ accomplishments in the scientific consensus
building. The standard was to meet concerns from industry who increasingly wanted
to use LCA for product development and marketing of greener products, but
experienced that the lack of a standardised methodology meant that different studies
of the same product could give opposite results depending on the concrete
methodological choices. The standard development resulted in the adoption and
release of four standards over the next seven years, addressing the principles and
framework (ISO 14040), the goal and scope definition (ISO 14041), the life cycle
impact assessment (ISO 14042) and the life cycle interpretation (ISO 14043). In a
2006 revision, the latter three were compiled in the ISO 14044 standard detailing the
requirements and guidelines, without changing any requirements in the standards.