Page 50 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

32 M. Owsianiak et al.

4.1 Background

Recent decades have witnessed numerous applications of LCA to support decisions
in an environmental sustainability context (see Chap. 3). Much efforts have been
made to facilitate the application of LCA and life cycle thinking in society ranging
from the regulatory and governmental level, through industry and production to the
level of citizens and consumers. The dissemination of LCA has been aided by a
number of initiatives for supporting and harmonizing the application of the tool. In
1997 the first version of the ISO 14040 standard (later updated as ISO 2006a) was
published in an attempt to harmonize the framework and principles of LCA and to
increase transparency and comparability of LCA studies. In 2001, The United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Society for Environmental
Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) joined forces in the launch of a global
Partnership to strengthen the dissemination and use of LCA worldwide, known as
the Life Cycle Initiative (LCI). The purpose of the initiative was to “enable users
around the world to put life cycle thinking into effective practice”. Another ini-
tiative supporting a more widespread application of LCA was The European
Commission’s project, The European Platform of Life Cycle Assessment, launched
in 2005. Its objective was to “promote life cycle thinking in business and in policy
making” in the European Union by focusing on underlying data and methodological
needs. The homepages of these initiatives provide a wide palette of information,
tools and support (http://www.lifecycleinitiative.org; http://eplca.jrc.ec.europa.eu/).
In parallel, many initiatives have been launched at the national level to facilitate
and support the application of LCA, often under the auspices of governmental
institutions such as environmental protection agencies (see Chap. 3), inspiring
numerous private and public LCA consultancies to emerge in assistance to com-
panies or institutions without the in-house LCA expertise. Recent widespread
LCA-related services are an elaboration of Environmental Product Declarations
(EPDs) or performance of Greenhouse Gasaccounting. Moreover, universities,
research institutions and private companies often enter into close collaboration on
LCA methodology development and application of LCA via, e.g. commercial
projects or industrial PhDs.
Here, we present examples of applications and discuss major motivations and
challenges for the use of LCA to support decision-making from the perspectives of
decision-makers within governments, industry and citizens. More details are given
in Part III of the book with chapters dedicated to different stakeholders and multiple
examples of the use of LCA within different technology domains. Chapter 18 gives
a more detailed introduction to the use of LCA and life cycle thinking in policy-
making in different parts of the world, and Chap. 19 discusses the globalization of
the use of LCA. Life cycle management (LCM) within business and industry is the
topic of Chap. 22, while Chap. 24 introduces the use of LCA in the development
and management of environmental labels and declarations.