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152 • Green Project Management

account for total energy use and to project future resource supplies and
use. In 1969, researchers initiated an internal study for the Coca-Cola
Company that laid the foundation for the current methods of life cycle
inventory analysis in the United States. In a comparison of different bever-
age containers to determine which container had the lowest releases to the
environment and least affected the supply of natural resources, this study
quantified the raw materials and fuels used and the environmental load-
ings from the manufacturing processes for each container. Other compa-
nies in both the United States and Europe performed similar comparative
life cycle inventory analyses in the early 1970s.
The process of quantifying the resource use and environmental releases
of products became known in the United States as a resource and envi-
ronmental profile analysis (REPA), while in Europe it was called an
Ecobalance. With the formation of public interest groups encouraging
industry to ensure the accuracy of information in the public domain, and
spurred on by the oil shortages in the early 1970s, a protocol methodology
for conducting these studies was developed and further evolved.
From 1975 through the early 1980s, as interest in these comprehen-
sive studies waned because of the fading influence of the oil crisis, envi-
ronmental concerns shifted to issues of hazardous and household waste
management. However, throughout this time, REPAs and Ecoblances con-
tinued to be conducted, and the methodology improved through a slow
stream of about two studies per year, most of which focused on energy
requirements.
When solid waste became a worldwide issue in 1988, LCA again emerged
as a tool for analyzing environmental problems. As interest in all areas
affecting resources and the environment grew, as with the growing aware-
ness of sustainable development, the methodology for LCA is again being
improved. A broad base of consultants and researchers across the globe
has been further refining and expanding the methodology. The need to
move beyond quantifying, or simply inventorying, resource use and envi-
ronmental emissions, as is done in a REPA, brought LCA methodology
to another point of evolution with the development of life cycle impact
assessment methodology.
LCA became popular again in the early 1990s, at first mainly to help
support environmental claims that could be directly used by companies
in the marketing of their products or services, and indeed this is one
use of an LCA. By the same token, a 1999 survey by Rubik and Frankl
4
showed that LCA is most often used for internal purposes such as product