Page 50 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

4.3.2 Case study: Yalumba Life cycle assessment as decision support: a systemic critique 37
Yalumba, a wine producer based in South Australia, commissioned a quick assessment to
compare the environmental impact of different types of wine casks. However, the results led to
the question: what is the environmental impact of wine bottles compared to casks? Accord-
ingly, the LCA was extended to compare bottles and casks. Although the results showed that
the impact of bottles was greater than casks per litre of wine delivered to the customer, a result
magnified by bottles having less volume than casks, it could not automatically be concluded
that casks were therefore better than bottles because this did not take into account the context
of the market for Yalumba’s wine. In this context, bottled wine is a premium product and not
generally drunk in the same way or for the same reasons as cask wine. Consumers choose
between bottled and cask wine on the basis of their budgets and the particular ‘wine experi-
ence’ they seek, and the quantity of wine delivered by each packaging type is generally less
important in this choice. The ‘wine experience’ includes a whole raft of non-material factors,
such as the sense of occasion provided by a bottle as opposed to a cask, perception of wine
quality, and so on. One of the most important factors is that bottled wine may be bought as
part of a collection to be stored (‘put down’), whereas cask wine is never bought for this reason
as its shelf life is only about six months. Because bottled wine is usually more expensive than
cask wine for all the reasons given above, consumers also buy less wine when they buy bottled
wine. The functional unit of the LCA was re-defined to reflect this context and became A$50
worth of wine at retail (gross turnover) rather than one litre of wine. On this basis, the LCA
results showed that the impact of bottles was actually similar to that of casks. When the impact
of the wine itself was also taken into account, the results showed that the impact of wine in
bottles (wine plus bottle) was less than half that of wine in casks.

4.4 Focus on functionality
The Yalumba example illustrates another way in which LCA can usefully engage with the com-
plexity of environmental problems. This is LCA’s focus on functionality. One fundamental
context of any product, system or organisation under assessment is its function or utility. This
function, however, is multi-faceted and may be variously defined. The functional unit in an
LCA is set according to the defined common function of the things being compared. How that
function is defined greatly influences the results.
An examination of functionality in the following example makes this clear. In Europe in
the 1990s, several environmental and economic studies were undertaken to evaluate alterna-
tive ways to minimise the energy consumption of clothes washing machines. The studies con-
cluded that there was little scope to improve energy efficiency because technical efficiency of
washing machines was already high, although there was some scope to decrease energy con-
sumption by addressing consumer behaviour, namely textile care in the home, especially
detergent use, load levels in the machine, drying and ironing practices. The functional unit for
these studies could be said to be ‘cleaning clothes with a home-owned washing machine’. A
pilot scheme undertaken by Electrolux in Sweden focused on an expanded function of ‘cleaning
clothes in the home’ (Jones and Harrison 2002). In this scheme, Electrolux and a local energy
utility offered customers a pay-per-wash option. Customers had a washing machine at home,
but did not own it and instead paid for their number of usages. This gave them an incentive to
reduce the number of usages and so save energy. If the function is further generalised as, for
example, ‘cleaning clothes’, non-domestic alternatives such as commercial laundering could be
considered. If the function is even further generalised as ‘providing adequate clothing’, then
alternative fabrics and alternative garment designs, along with issues such as wear resistance,
moisture and odour absorption or control, would all be relevant. Consider, for instance,

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