Page 176 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

Prospects for life cycle assessment development and practice in the quest for sustainable consumption

most costs (both environmental and financial) are ‘locked in’ during design, this is an impor- 163
tant challenge, and is also coupled with the need to make the LCA process quicker, less onerous
and more accessible, while maintaining sufficient accuracy and rigour.
As discussed in Chapter 11, despite various market difficulties, some manufacturers have
embraced ‘Design for Environment’ principles and/or LCA, across a range of sectors, from
commercial furniture, mass market electrical consumer goods and even the service sector.
This has led to resource efficiencies in manufacturing processes, most often following (com-
parative) assessment of environmental performance after design, as in ‘traditional’ LCA, rather
than in a preventative sense, by designers. A key to unlocking the design conundrum and
bringing LCA forward in the process is the development of life cycle management (LCM) tools
in quick, accessible, software form readily adopted by design practitioners. With much
improved databases, such tools are practicable. However, there are a range of other require-
ments, including the incorporation of business drivers and the integration of LCA within
existing design tools across the different design disciplines (Horne et al. 2007). A pertinent
example is the Packaging Impact Quick Evaluation Tool (PIQET) (see Chapter 11). It is also
necessary to recognise the limits of the design professions to act and implement change in iso-
lation from business, cultural, social and policy change. LCA tools need to speak equally to
these disciplines if they are to be effective in supporting the aspirations of ‘green’ designers.
12.2.2 Uptake in business
Many businesses are already being affected by a rapidly changing set of social norms relating to
environmental performance. Consumers, policy makers, regulators and other businesses are
providing environmental performance challenges. The future levels of performance required
and implications for a given business may not yet be known, but they will invariably require
considerable attention, and can be expected to change rapidly over the next decade. There is an
important role for LCA in assisting businesses in understanding their impacts and the likely
challenges in reducing them. LCA will be increasingly institutionalised, being used within
environmental management systems certified to the International Organization for Standard-
ization’s ISO 14001, in substantiating product environmental claims, and in driving environ-
mental impact awareness internally and through supply chains.
Product and service providers, manufacturers and businesses have already utilised LCA,
although uptake to date has been rather patchy. There is considerable scope for the further
uptake of LCA in-house within businesses, to evaluate production processes and/or service
provision and inform decisions about redesign, investment and development of future products
and services. In particular, LCAs of products/services will become more systematic as attempts
gather pace to drive down supply chain environmental burdens and reduce carbon emissions
and related costs.
Such embedding processes provide the opportunity to develop or expand in-house LCA
awareness and capacity. A useful ‘goal’ for business managers might be to make environmental
evaluation and decision support techniques such as LCA as ubiquitous and well understood as
financial management techniques, and to make LCA data at least as widely understood and
available as economic statistics, and financial reports and accounts. This will make LCA infor-
mation cheaper to obtain and use, and will also facilitate transformation of decision-making
through the inevitable seismic shift in social capacity resulting from widespread knowledge
and practice involving the exchange of information about life cycle environmental burdens.

12.2.3 Uptake by policy makers
The point about making environmental data and LCA practice as ubiquitous, accessible and
widely understood as economic and financial practices and data is also highly pertinent to

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