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newest concepts, allows an integrated approach to minimizing environmental loads
throughout the life-cycle of a product, system or service.
From a different point of view, LCA can be applied in establishing public policy.
Sustainable development has been included as a major item on most governmental
agendas since the Rio Summit in 1992. It is obvious that the LCA approach must
be used to ensure that actions toward a more sustainable future will have the desired
effect. In this framework, the main governmental applications regarding LCA are
product-oriented policies, deposit-refund programs (including waste management
policies), subsidy taxation and general process-oriented policies. Finally, anything
we do to make LCA useful will not really help unless the world believes it is efficient.
For this reason, LCA experts admit the necessity of giving more information about
LCA issues in order to increase credibility of the tool and gain greater acceptance
from the public. A great interest exists about what other people think of the discipline
and its implications for the future.
Approaches to consumption have been valuable to the analysis of current con-
ditions and have promoted novel strategies for future development. This has exposed
the limitations of isolated production-focused strategies. What is urgently needed is
to change the systems of production and consumption in an integrated way. The
recent Life-Cycle Initiative (UNEP/SETAC Life-Cycle Initiative, 2002; Udo de Haes
et al. 2002) mentioned in Section 2.1.2 is going in that direction, which means a
life-cycle approach is needed for changing unsustainable consumption and produc-
tion patterns.

2.2 LCA FRAMEWORK AND THE ISO 14000 PATTERN

The ISO standardized the technical framework for the life-cycle assessment meth-
odology in the 1990s. On this basis, according to ISO 14040 (1997), LCA consists
of the following steps (Figure 2.1):

• Goal and scope definition
• Inventory analysis
• Impact assessment
• Interpretation

LCA is not necessarily carried out in a single sequence. It is an iterative process
in which subsequent rounds can achieve increasing levels of detail (from screening
LCA to full LCA) or lead to changes in the first phase prompted by the results of
the last phase.
The steps of LCA are distributed along ISO patterns. For example, ISO14040
(1997) provides the general framework for LCA. ISO 14041 (1998) provides guid-
ance for determining the goal and scope of an LCA study and for conducting a life-
cycle inventory (LCI). ISO 14042 (2000) deals with the life-cycle impact assessment
(LCIA) step and ISO 14043 (2002) provides statements for the interpretation of
results produced by an LCA. Moreover, technical guidelines illustrate how to apply
the standards.

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