Page 62 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

L1644_C02.fm Page 39 Tuesday, October 21, 2003 3:07 PM

Due in part to higher access to public data and an increased environmental
awareness of the population, new LCA projects were developed in the industry as
well as in the public sector. Such growth resulted in the “launch” of this subject at
an international level in 1990. That year, conferences about LCA were held in
Washington, D.C. (organized by the World Wildlife Fund and sponsored by the EPA),
Vermont (organized by SETAC) and Leuven, Belgium (organized by Procter &
Gamble).
On their part, public organizations such as the Swiss Federal Office of Environ-
ment, Forests and Landscape (BUWAL) started to study industrial sectors or products
at the time they made the achieved results public. Among these, it is worth men-
tioning BUWAL’s 1991 and 1994 reports. Also, in the private sector, companies
such as Franklin Associates, Ltd. published their studies on materials used for
container manufacturing and material transportation (Franklin Associates, Ltd. 1990,
1991). Other organizations, for example, the Association of Plastics Manufactures
in Europe (APME) and the European Center for Plastics in the Environment (PWMI),
also published their studies on plastic materials (Boustead, 1993a, b, c; 1994a, b,
c). SPOLD (Society for the Promotion of LCA Development, an association estab-
lished by 20 large European businesses with the aim of fostering and standardizing
the use of LCA) was founded in 1992.
Growth in the number of studies, as well as in organizations devoted to this
subject matter, allowed the publication of works intended to standardize the criteria
to be applied in LCA studies. Among these were Fava et al. (1991), Heijungs et al.
(1992), Boustead (1992), Fecker (1992), Vigon et al. (1993), SETAC (1993) and
Guinée et al. (1993a, b).
In June 1993, the ISO created the Technical Committee 207 (ISO/TC 207) with
the goal of developing international norms and rules for environmental management.
The fifth of the six subcommittees created, the LCA SC5, was assigned standard-
ization within the field of LCA. Its aim is to prevent the presentation of partial results
or data of questionable reliability from LCA studies for marketing purposes, thus
ensuring that each application is carried out in accordance with universally valid
structure and features. As a result of this work, we rely on the different ISO standards
mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book (ISO 14040, 1997).
In the 1990s, the annual conferences by SETAC and the Working Groups on
LCA played a paramount role in developing this methodology to its current status.
For an overview on the results of this work, see Udo de Haes et al. (1999) and Udo
de Haes et al. (2002a).
More recently, the Life-Cycle Initiative (UNEP/SETAC Life-Cycle Initiative,
2002; Udo de Haes et al., 2002b) has been launched jointly by UNEP and SETAC.
This initiative builds on the ISO 14040 standards and aims to establish approaches
with best practice for a life-cycle economy, corresponding to the call of governments
in the Malmö declaration of 2000. In May 2000, UNEP and SETAC signed a letter
of intent and established the Life-Cycle Initiative. The mission of the initiative is

… to develop and implement practical concepts and tools for evaluating the opportu-
nities, risks and trade-offs associated with products and services over their entire life-
cycle.

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