Page 178 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

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

less; but with the foresight of reflexive practice and measured experience. In accepting this 165
challenge, we can now consider what experience can tell us about where LCA may venture –
and what should be regarded as off-limits.
So, the first point must be that the interpretation of LCA results should not be undertaken
lightly, and the special responsibility that LCA practitioners have as stewards of rare insights
into the environmental flows of human processes (and by inference, directions for policy)
should not be underestimated. An LCA may reveal the world behind a product, but is this suf-
ficient to direct new product processes, or to reveal the relative costs and benefits of a world
without that product?
Given the vast variability and dynamics of ecological, cultural, economic, legal and politi-
cal structures and systems as indicated above, we must recognise that there is an interdepend-
ent relationship between the development and provision of environmental impact information
and the resulting practice and policy responses. Developments in policy contexts across differ-
ent sectors and the growth of LCA-related stakeholder groups are examples of a growing soft
infrastructure and awareness concerning life cycle impact concepts. As these develop, tensions
arise within LCA practice as to appropriate directions and developments, as the political
context manifests itself. Institutionalisation of LCA could be regarded as a means by which
control is exerted over the application of the technique, therefore influencing the results
obtained, whether through direct influence over data or, more likely, over careful manipula-
tion of the questions and system boundaries.
Second, like a toddler gaining confidence in walking, LCA will become more purposeful
and surefooted as it expands in application. For example, input-output based LCA has already
provided useful indications of patterns and trends of agricultural impacts, and more specific
studies have been undertaken (e.g. see Chapter 9, Foran et al. 2005; Wood et al. 2006). In the
future, process LCA application can be expanded significantly to: address outstanding ques-
tions around future agricultural efficiency and security; investigate the impacts associated
with different scales of agriculture (e.g. small, medium and large farms, urban crops); examine
optimal packaging and storage systems to control food wastes for least overall impact; and
identify combined environmental and health impacts and benefits of different organic and low
input, and other alternative agricultural practices and systems.
Third, in concert with increased application is the need for improvements in the technique
– particularly in methods and data. Indeed, there remains a multitude of needs for environ-
mental data arising through energy, water, greenhouse and pollution reporting schemes,
including voluntary reporting using LCA data by businesses. This has been indicated at many
points throughout this book and so need not be expanded further here, except to note that
there are already data inventory development projects underway, including the Australian
inventory project led by ALCAS (see Chapter 2), and there is emerging potential to mine the
Internet for LCA data from manufacturers and suppliers.
The use of special Internet mark-up language that identifies LCA data is useful because
web-crawling tools can find and organise the data in the same way that search engines organise
other Internet content. One open source database initiative is the Earthster initiative, which is
building life cycle tools for assessing the impact of purchases. Initially, the project is based on
public databases, but there is a longer term plan to develop tools to source other Internet-based
data sources as potential suppliers, so that anyone can compare product LCA performance
with the average documented in LCA databases (Norris 2007). Apart from resources and time,
issues of third-party validation and commercial confidentiality are key issues which such ini-
tiatives are dealing with.
Fourth, LCA has already proved its worth in indicating that initiatives based on single issues
or partial analyses, whether food miles, packaging or energy use, may indicate legitimate issues,

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