Page 43 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

3 LCA History 25

The ISO 14040 series standards concern the LCA methodology, but in the ISO
14000 series of Environmental Management standards, there are also standards and
technical guidance reports on the applications of LCA for e.g. eco-design (ISO
14062, ISO 14006), communication of environmental performance (ISO 14020
series on ecolabels and ISO 14063), and greenhouse gas reporting and reduction
(ISO 14064).

3.4.3 Standardisation of Methodology Beyond the ISO
Standards: The European ILCD

LCA methodology was very young and rather immature while the ISO standardi-
sation process took place in the 1990s, and the resulting standards are therefore not
very detailed on specific methodological choices but rather focused on the frame-
work and the fundamental principles of LCA. This is one of the reasons why the
work of the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative was needed to evaluate alternative
practices and develop recommendations from a scientific point of view. It was also
the background for a process initiated by the European Commissionin the
mid-2000s to develop an International Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) with a
database of life cycle inventory data and a series of methodological guidelines.
With the development of the Integrated Product Policy and the action plan for
Sustainable Consumption and Production, there was a need for a strong method-
ological basis of the LCA which was the method used for judging alternatives and
communicating on the impacts of products and consumption. The ISO standards
left too many possibilities for ambiguities in the applied methodology and in a
consultation process, the EU Commission’s Joint Research Centre’s Institute for
Environment and Sustainability developed a comprehensive guideline in LCA
(EC-JRC 2010) that builds on the ISO 14040 and 14044 standards, and over 394
pages specifies the majority of the methodological choices that are left open by the
ISO standards. Adherence to the ILCD guideline is intended to ensure more con-
sistent and reproducible results of LCAs performed by different practitioners and
hence increase comparability of LCA results from different studies. We have
compiled the central provisions of the ILCD guideline as a Cookbook for LCA in
Chap. 37 and the core methodological Chaps. (7–13) are inspired by and consistent
with the ILCD guidelines. The ILCD work also involved a comparative analysis of
all available LCIA methodologies (around 2008) comparing their approaches to
assessment of the different midpoint and endpoint impact categories and identifying
a recommendable practice for each impact category. The collection of best practices
for each impact category was compiled as the ILCD impact assessment method
(EC-JRC 2011). After the release of the ILCD guidelines in 2012, the EU
Commission launched the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and
Organisational Environmental Footprint (OEF) Guidelines as abbreviated and