Page 14 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

Chapter 1

Life cycle assessment: origins, principles
and context

Ralph E Horne

The launch of the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 14001 (‘Environmen-
tal management systems – Specification with guidance for use’) in 1996 indicated to many
businesses that ad hoc environmental management was no longer an option. For an increasing
number of organisations, regulations, business drivers and the public environmental and
social concerns had reached a level where a more strategic and systematic approach to environ-
mental challenges was necessary. The resultant rapid rise in corporate environmental manage-
ment and accompanying discourse is already well charted and critiqued (e.g. Rondinelli and
Vastag 2000; Sandström 2005).
Contemporaneously, life cycle assessment (LCA) began to produce convincing evidence that
intuition was no longer enough either. ‘Natural’ products were found to be not necessarily envi-
ronmentally optimal. Many ‘counter-intuitive’ outcomes from LCA studies indicated the need
for a closer systemic approach to identify and document impacts along the process chain and
life time of products and services. Business began to take a greater interest in LCA (Frankl and
Rubik 2000) and a series of texts appeared on the subject (e.g. Curran 1996; Ciambrone 1997;
Graedel 1998). The physical sciences and engineering disciplines began to recognise LCA as a
tool to help reconcile values, technological impacts and the environment (Hofstetter 1999) and
the United Nations (UN) began to envisage the global roll-out of LCA practice (UNEP 2000).
As the roll-out gathers pace, this book is intended to provide scholars and professionals
across a range of disciplines with a critical perspective on the practice of LCA and its possible
future directions. It is not intended as a guide or handbook, of which there are several already
(e.g. Baumann and Tillman 2004). Instead, theory, methodologies and applications of LCA
are critically examined. Key developments, challenges and opportunities are illustrated with
case studies.
This chapter, as well as introducing subsequent chapters, charts the origins of LCA and
then defines the technique before placing it within the wider context of environmental man-
agement and assessment.

1.1 LCA origins
Humans have long been concerned with the energy efficiency of technologies and the services
they provide. Perennial questions arise from Newton’s First Law of Thermodynamics – if energy
is never lost, in what proportions does it dissipate through various processes? What is the energy
benefit and loss in various processes? Also, specifically, for energy ‘generation’ (i.e. ‘conver-
sion’), how much input energy is necessary to produce a given energy service? Then again, and

1

100804•Life Cycle Assessment 5pp.indd 1 17/02/09 12:46:14 PM