Page 44 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

26 A. Bjørn et al.

slightly revised versions of the ILCD guidelines targeting different categories of
products or services to be applied by companies and organisations reporting on their
environmental performance.

3.5 Dissemination

Early studies commissioned by companies were often not published due to confi-
dential information on industrial processes and the difficulty of communicating
results in non-technical language. The first peer-reviewed LCA-like study was the
packaging study commissioned by the US EPA (see Sect. 3.2) published in 1974.
After the development of the ISO 14040 series standards on LCA, starting in 1997,
it became a common practice for companies to publish peer-reviewed LCA reports
to document environmental claims, although full disclosure of underlying data is
still rare due to confidentiality issues. Academic journals have become an important
medium for the dissemination of LCA studies, whether made to support decisions
in, e.g. companies, or for research purposes. In 1996, the first academic journal fully
dedicated to LCA was born, The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment.
This journal and other journals have seen a sharp increase in the number of pub-
lished papers related to life cycle assessment, from less than 100 in 1998 to more
than 1300 in 2013 as illustrated in Fig. 3.2, which indicates an exponential
development of the number of publications in this period. The publication of LCA
reports outside academic journals is difficult to map, but is likely to have seen a
similar development as indicated by the increase in company use of LCA illustrated
in Fig. 3.1.

Fig. 3.2 Development in number of published LCA-related academic articles in English per year
2
according to Web of Science (WoS) (Chen et al. 2014). The high R value for the fitted
exponential function indicates an exponential development. Reprinted with permission of Springer